Broccoli: One of My 2nd Favorite Foods.

                So… how about the feed? I’m a little dumbstruck, maybe due in part to the less than stellar language in the book, but also due to the fact that the ending was, for lack of a better phrase, like meg null. The corporations let her die. GOODNESS GRACIOUS they just let her die and didn’t even try to do anything about it. I’m a little steamed about it. In fact, I’m steaming like a floret of freshly cooked broccoli. Yeah, I just went there and used a food simile. WHAT NOW?

                But more on the point of feeds. Clearly the corporations marketed it as a beneficial tool for convenience and education and technology at your fingertips. If they had advertised its flaws, they wouldn’t have sold any microchips to begin with. I guess it is handy in looking quick things up, like using a computer without having to boot up your actual computer. For education purposes, I’m opposed simply because it doesn’t encourage real learning when you can search for whatever facts or information you need at any given moment.

Even though my feelings about the feed aren’t superbly positive (we’re like frenemies), should I still resist it if our society reaches that point in the future?

Sadly, I’m not so sure I would. Once the feed is installed, I would probably adapt and even begin to enjoy the things that it does for me. If I’m looking for a specific book or piece of clothing or knick knack and it knows exactly what I’m talking about, power to it! It saves me a lot of time and energy. If I can take pictures with my mind, I won’t have to worry about capturing it on my camera, because let’s face it, I’ve got shaky hands so most of my pictures come out blurry anyway.

Besides its apparent benefits, it’s always hard to go against the flow. If a fish tries to swim against the current, guess what? It will probably die or try to jump over the water and get eaten by a bear or something. Personally, I don’t really want to get eaten by the metaphorical bear which is the control of corporations. And as Violet’s situation demonstrated, if you fight the big guys, you lose.

She chose to fight the feed and she ended up paralyzed and brain dead. Just from that vivid experience, I would probably stray from resisting the feed. Of course I’m going to value my life above fighting a losing battle against the feed. I’m only human. I’m also not as brave or as committed to overturning authority as she was, so I’m going to need a lot of preparation if I want to prevent the feed or fight it if it arrives. Maybe there’s a course in overthrowing corporate monopoly on the human mind. I wonder if they offer that at COD.

I Ain't Scared of no Goats.

“’The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world…The worst thing in the world,’

said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by

drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’” (1984, p.283)

 

Fear has this creepy way of taking hold of us. There is no feeling like it, and no feeling that trumps it. For Winston, his greatest fear was rats, that they may crawl on his and gnaw off his face. For me, you could basically name anything and chances are I’d be afraid of it or something related to it. Some things on my phobia list: Whales, snake bites, getting things in my eyes, being paralyzed… so the list goes on. If you were faced with the scariest thing you know, what would you do to avoid it? Apparently anything, such as betray the only person you’ve ever loved, as was the case in 1984. (Which, by the way, Winston lost any pity I had for him by doing that. Jerk.)

 

But we usually think of fear as an individual affair, a feeling that only we feel internally. But oftentimes we see a collective fear, such as the fear of a group or of a nation. In 1984, there was an unspoken fear by the people not in the inner party that the party would assassinate them at any moment. In the Middle East, there is a collective fear and resulting anger of the masses against their oppressive governments. As the article details, Japanese activists acted in the way they did out of fear of China.

Actually when you think about it, we see fear in a lot of governments’ actions. Japan’s not the only nation acting out of fear of their opponents. We do it too. A lot of our government’s actions are based upon the need to be a superpower, to be the best in something like energy, education, or economic stability. This need, in turn, is fueled by fear. We fear falling behind excelling nations like China, we fear instability like the Arab Spring, we fear a gosh darn lot of things. Clearly fear is an excellent motivator though, to influence our decisions and our actions to avoid that which we fear— which in some cases is good, and other cases not so much.

 

This whole government issue doesn’t really feel like it’s relevant to our teenage lives, so I’ll use a more suitable example for the grand finale of this post. Next time you’re walking down the street and you are faced with something you fear, (let’s say for this hypothetical, that you fear goats) approach it like you’re not afraid. I want you to walk up to that goat and yell “You don’t scare me goat!” and get reasonably up in its face. Let it know that fear doesn’t rule your life, that unlike all those governments and people like Winston that act out of fear, by golly, you don’t. Then walk off with your head held high, because guess what? You sure showed that goat who’s boss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wow. Sorry, that last part got kind of random and weirdly dramatic… I guess that’s what fear does to you sometimes.