Consider the following comments on sacrifice.
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
The Gospel of John
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Thomas Jefferson
We are asked to sacrifice for a future we will never see, on the promise of those who will never pay.
A sacrifice nobody notices is the only kind worth making.
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
George Bernard Shaw
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
Consider arguing that genuine sacrifice requires a real cost willingly borne for another's good, which means much of what we label sacrifice is closer to investment or coercion. Concede first that sacrifice can be the highest expression of love or duty, as in the soldier or the parent. Then complicate this by exposing how the rhetoric of sacrifice is exploited to extract obedience from the powerless. A third angle could weigh anonymous sacrifice against the performed, public kind. Caution: resist treating all sacrifice as either pure nobility or pure manipulation, since the interesting cases sit between.