Our present society tends to underestimate the cost of how we live our lives. They tend to lean towards seeing only the superficial consequences and prices to the things that often have a deeper effect. When asked the cost of living deliberately many of today’s youth would answer this question by saying that an individual could go to jail or be ostracized, but there is a much bigger price which some have had to pay. When living a life full of determined purpose, which instills a sense of hope into many, all one can ask for is that their actions be remembered, but for people like President Abraham Lincoln and San Francisco board member, Harvey Milk, they are forced to be remembered by the event which took their life, rather than the legacy they wished to leave, and this is the truly devastating price they were forced to pay. Many people in our country’s history have been killed for standing up for what they believed in. A substantial amount of the members of our modern society remember the deaths of historical figures, but so few remember what they stood for.

As young students children are taught about President Lincoln, but rather than speaking first about what he did and then stating that he was killed, they are told that he was assassinated for what he did. From that moment on the first thing they tend to think of when they hear his name is how devastating his death had been, rather than how purposeful of a life he had lived. During his presidency he achieved so many great things, the most well known being the Emancipation Proclamation, but even this major historical speech stands no ground against his assassination. His death was tragic, but the bigger tragedy is that it is the main thing he is remembered for.
In the mid to late 1970s Harvey Milk began leaving his impact. He established a group determined to provide support for the gay community. He did so much to implant a sense of hope for a better life into the minds of all members of the gay community. He ran for a position on the Board of San Francisco many times, finally prevailing around 1977. He attempted to put laws in place to protect the members of the gay community. He gave a speech entitled “The Hope Speech” in which he spoke about all minorities, and that for society to change the views they had of them, they must be elected into office. A minority in office allows people to judge that community of minorities based off their leaders rather than their stereotypes. In the speech Milk said something along the lines of us having to give them hope for a better life, a better world, and a better tomorrow.

In November of 1979 both Harvey Milk and the mayor of San Francisco were shot and killed. The assassin was a fellow board member. In his time in office Milk achieved many things, yet prior to this year when I conducted my own research about him I had only known him as a man who was killed for being gay. Once again we see that his untimely death caused his truly inspirational life to be forgotten.

Other people around the world have had their legacies forgotten due to the circumstances of their deaths. Often times it isn’t until later in our lives as integrated members of society that we realize the truly amazing things the victims of assassinations had done, and this is the true price that many of the people who have lived deliberately have been forced to pay.