Living Other People's Childhoods

David Sedaris is jealous that his partner, Hugh, is able to visit an Ethiopian slaughterhouse for a field trip. Which is ironic because in America, it would be highly inappropriate and it wouldn't be one of the first places to come to mind. The trip concludes with the short-lived introduction of a white little piglet with trotters clacking "delicately" on the floor. It is subsequently shot at point-blank range and although the children are traumatized, the teachers are hardly fazed. Hugh also recounts without much enthusiasm, the visits to actual fields, the room where a dictator was murdered, and watching hyenas being fed. For Hugh, his life is close to typical for him; for Sedaris, Hugh's life is unique and mindblowingly amazing. 

Of course, Sedaris imagines this from his point of view. His life in the slow, easy-going North Carolina does not even hit the radar of "astounding excitement!" To achieve this compare/contrast, Sedaris uses extensive parallelism, point-by-point, to highlight that his life is rather uneventful. While his pets are named normal names so normal that I can't even remember them, Hugh's pets are called Satan and Charlie Brown. Furthermore, Hugh has a monkey, the epitome of exoticism. (WHO DOESN'T WANT A PET MONKEY WHOSE ARMS YOU CAN RUN INTO?) Sedaris remarks that “the verbs are the same, but [Hugh] definitely wins the prize when it comes to nouns and objects” (8). He admits that he and Hugh shared similar landmarks in life; however, despite the difference in outward lifestyles, both shared almost the same level of contentment. Hugh saw nothing special about his daily life, and likewise, Sedaris saw nothing special about his daily life. It is all a matter of perspective.

Sedaris' entire passage is covered in irony. He knows that Hugh's life is not necessarily the best, yet he portrays it as so. Sedaris wants the glories and experiences from Hugh's life, without the danger. Like a "petty thief", he borrows Hugh's life and adapts it as his own with no reserve. This allows him to fill out the gaps in his childhood and to flair and smooth it out as well. He realizes that there are those who are worse off than him, and that he should remain content with what blessings he has.

Advancing Backwards

Alice's Red Queen once said, "you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." We are constantly hungering for knowledge, to cure the diseases which may ironically, be caused by our own experimentation. We advance, only to fall backwards again, impeded by our blind search for the meaning of life. We find ourselves looking for antibiotics that cure what mankind as released onto itself. Like Victor Frankenstein who unleashed his monster into the world only to have his loved ones murdered, Marie Curie's radium not only killed herself, but was also used in nuclear weapons that killed others and currently leaves nations at the brink of disaster.

In Raymo's "Measure of Restraint", he relates the tale of the little girl who, unbeknownst to her, rubbed radioactive materials all over her body like "carnival glitter". The most dangerous part of knowledge and science is that it assumes the guise of innocence and harmlessness. Our GM (genetically modified) foods sit harmlessly on the supermarket shelves and eventually make their way into the body. What are the long-term effects? They are evident in other arenas of life. We eat antibiotics like we drink water, using them for any aliment. What are we seeing now, decades from the discovery of penicillin by Fleming? We are dumping millions of tons of bacteria into the environment, leading to the survival of drug-resistant strains that leave doctors to "keep running" and find new antibiotics that will, in time, be rendered useless again. Yet we have no other alternative. It's either keep ahead of the pack, or be eaten by the pack. A PBS special remarked that "time was running out" for certain individuals with multi-drug resistance, and that bacteria are gaining resistance too quickly for new cures to hit the markets. Should we let these people die? While Raymo's argument is understandable, it's absolutely irrational not to pursue science altogether. Man was bound to move forward, but he/she must do so with a level of caution.

You hear it on the news everywhere. Plasmids cut and glowing jellyfish genes inserted into bacteria or plants. Corn that is engineered corn, meat that is cloned. What are the consequences in the future. I think it was a bag of Sunchips that I ate once. It was the loudest, crunchiest bag ever, but had a stamp of approval "100% biodegradable" or some other greeny message on it. Although it sounded like an eco-friendly alternative to tossing it in the trash, the bag actually had a disclaimer: It would be reduced to plastic particles barely visible to the eye, yet "____ particles' effects on the environment are unknown at this time". In essence, we're trying to hide our own problems, the trash created from previous experiments, through new experiments. How much longer will it be before we realize that plastic or some unknown particle is killing us, just as the scientists realized that radium was deadly?

Much like how Eve ate the apple from the tree of knowledge and was banished from the Garden of Eden, we must approach science cautiously; it is a double-headed snake waiting to strike when we least expect it.

To be Poor or to be Rich

Being poor is terrible. No one ever wants to be poor, and whenever politicians and activists speak out about it, they denounce it and address it as one would best address a deadly disease, delicately, but not so. If you really want to get into the economics of it, poverty-stricken people would always have to exist, because wealth is very subjective. Furthermore, if everyone were "rich" and had endless money at their disposal, there would be mass inflation--and we can't have that--or everyone would be "equal" in wealth, making us all socialists or communists. Either way, we find that we must deal with our situations and that money does not necessarily correlate with happiness. (A good example which I am lifting straight from my textbook is the economic boom in China after 1994. Although urban people are wealthier by many degrees and conditions are improving, they are no more happy than the rural farmer.)

In Hazlitt's "On the Want of Money", he outright states that "Literally and truly, one cannot get on well in the world without money." This is true; without two pennies to rub together, you find yourself wondering where to get your next meal from and where you can sleep safely from night to night. There is no security in abject poverty, but at the same time, too much security in wealth leads to dissatisfaction and boredom. Hazlitt goes on to detail all that affluent people can do, but also the misery and unhappiness that accompanies it. He makes us realize that material wealth is superficial, and that we'll be unhappy no matter how much, or how little, we have of it until we reach the self-actualizaion stage on Maslow's hierarchy of needs and pursue what makes us happy. Or as Alan Watts put it, "What if money were no object? How would you really live your life?" In a society that places so much emphasis on having money to be successful, a majority of us compromise our true happiness for it. In the end, Hazlitt illustrates, we all meet the same fate, rich or poor, and we all have just one life to live. We can live happy and die happy, or life unhappy and die unhappy. 

How to Alter Public Space for Dummies

Brent Staples comes across as a menacing, towering, young black male to all of his "victims". He describes the pain of being labelled and ostracized upon entering the social stage, and calls his ability to alter public space an unfortunate "inheritance". He is mistaken as a mugger, a potential attacker, and a thief time and time again. The black men are all connected in this way; they have experienced it and can only cope by sharing their stories. Staples understands that this idea has been deeply planted in society, and he does not expect it to change because despite the unfairness, there is a seed of truth. After all, how are you supposed to decide whether someone is a mugger or not when it is dark outside in a secluded place? (And if the news about last night's mugging is still fresh in your mind, it's bound to have a negative effect.)

This piece reminded me of the Trayvon Martin shooting incident that actually occurred just last year. Martin was an unarmed 17-year-old African American male who was suspected because he was in a guarded neighborhood, "cutting in-between houses...walking very leisurely for the [rainy] weather", and "looking at all the houses" as well as wearing a shifty-looking hoodie. Although there was a violent confrontation between Zimmerman and Martin, it's unclear who began it. The sad part is that black males take to violence more often and are more prominently featured in news stories than anyone else. This leads to the mentality that all black males are the same...which can be understandable to a certain extent. I've read Duke "alert emails" to all students, where the perpetrator of the muggings is described as a "tall, young, black male, wearing a grey shirt and blue jeans". The only difference is that some wear masks while others don't, so it's almost questionable as to who actually did it. So should we continue to allow black males to alter public space or should we stay cool and change this mentality? It's hard to say.

Well folks, I suppose the lesson is: When you're in doubt, always whistle Vivaldi Four Seasons.