Tuesday, April 24, 2012

I finished reading White Noise by Don DeLillo a few days ago. It blatantly and discretely discusses fear of dying juxtaposed to our insensitivity of other's deaths (even a begging for it) and our attraction toward disaster, as well as hinting on consumerism, and at times, classism, throughout. One of my favourite things about the book is that he keeps on giving dialogue for the tv or radio in the next room, as though it were a character. That, and the main character's son, Heinrich, who filled the dialogue with endless questions. This is one of my favourites:

"They seem to have everything under control," I said.
"Who?"
"Whoever's in charge out there."
"Who's in charge?"
"Never mind."
"It's like we've been flung back in time," he said. "Here we are in the Stone Age, knowing all these great things after centuries of progress but what can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers? Can we make a refrigerator? Can we even explain how it works? What is electricity? What is light? We experience these things every day of our lives but what good does it do if we find ourselves hurled back in time and we can't even tell people the basic principles much less actually make something that would improve conditions. Name one thing you could make. Could you make a wooden match that you could strike on a rock to make a flame? We think we're so great and modern. Moon landings, artificial hearts. But what if you were hurled into a time warp and came face to face with the ancient Greeks. The Greeks invented trigonometry. They did autopsies and dissections. What could you tell an ancient Greek that he couldn't say, 'Big deal.' Could you tell him about the atom? Atom is a Greek word. The Greeks knew that the major events of the universe can't be seen by the eye of man. It's waves, it's rays, it's particles."
"We're doing all right."
"We're sitting in this huge moldy room. It's like we're flung back."
"We have heat, we have light."
"These are Stone Age things. They had heat and light. They had fire. They rubbed flints together and made sparks. Could you rub flints together? Would you know a flint if you saw one? If a Stoner Ager asked you what a nucleotide is, could you tell him? How do we make carbon paper? What is glass? If you came awake tomorrow in the Middle Ages and there was an epidemic raging, what could you do to stop it, knowing what you know about the progress of medicines and diseases? Here it is practically the twenty-first century and you've read hundreds of books and magazines and seen a hundred TV shows about science and medicine. Could you tell those people one little crucial thing that might save a million and a half lives?"
"'Boil your water,' I'd tell them."
"Sure. What about 'Wash behind your ears.' That's about as good."
"I still think we're doing fairly well. There was no warning. We have food, we have radios."
"What is a radio? What is the principle of a radio? Go ahead, explain. You're sitting in the middle of this circle of people. They use pebble tools. They eat grubs. Explain a radio."
"There's no mystery. Powerful transmitters send signals. They travel through the air, to be picked up by receivers."
"They travel through the air. What, like birds? Why not tell them magic? They travel through the air in magic waves. What is a nucleotide? You don't know, do you? Yet these are the building blocks of life. What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything."

In our society, we reward those who sit at desks and supervise, and ignore the people who do the grunt work that makes our society run (building houses, fixing cars, the education system). Ever since I took a class on Utopian literature, I've come to agree with Edward Bellamy's suggestion that wage should be standardized. Whether you're a janitor or are a top-scientist inventing genius ways of using energy in ways that are more environmental, or a baseball player if we're going to keep entertainment in the picture (which we will), you get paid the same. This would eliminate people entering careers for the money's sake (doctors), and would allow us to actually think about our strengths and our personalities when it came to choosing a career.

I want to be more self-sustainable. I actually yearn (yes, that strong of a word) for the day that I live on a plot of land that I can produce my own food on, that I can walk on -- not because I can call it mine, but because I am free to use it as I please (which is synonymous with ownership, I know, but I don't like to think about owning the items that I use, even though that's the currency of thought we use). I would like to think that if some kind of natural disaster happened that caused us to go back to the Stone Ages, I would know the basics of how to live -- something that we are losing, I believe, relying on those floating above in some office building determining when the traffic light turns green. All of us waiting, patiently, urgently, for someone else to tell us what to do.

My science prof in Bio 100 (a class I almost failed -- almost being a 51%) told us that every population reaches a peak and then something happens. It needs to fail, to fall. The human population is at its peak, he said, so something needs to happen, some kind of plague or disease or natural disaster or something to get our levels down to a more manageable state.

In the event that my bio prof is actually right (which, I might argue otherwise) I hope that I will be able to prove my human worth by being able to start a fire and cook my own bread and plant some vegetables and milk a cow instead of being what we are -- distanced.

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