3 Different Flowers-1 Ugly Bouquet.

This year, the NBA (National Basketball Association) was blessed. Rather, the Miami Heat was blessed. Over the summer, the Miami Heat acquired a number of key players. Chris Bosh, a strong power forward from the Toronto Raptors, and LeBron James, 6 time NBA-All Star, from the Cleveland Cavaliers. Miami Heat fans were ecstatic, and for good reasons. James, Bosh, and returning NBA All-Star Dwayne Wade told fans, “not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven” when asked how many championships the Heat would win. The standard had been set incredibly high for a team that had yet to build chemistry and a strong foundation.

While Miami fans were thrilled, Cleveland fans were distraught. Fans took pictures and made movies of themselves burning LeBron jerseys, something that you would not expect sports fans to do. The fact of the matter is that Cleveland was, and will always be LeBron’s home. He went to High School in Cleveland, was drafted to the NBA team representing Ohio, and became the basketball player that he is today in Cleveland. His fans were so tied on to him, that when he left, it was as if they had lost one of their children. It was especially painful for fans due to the infamous “Decision”, when LeBron held a one-hour special event on ESPN, during which he announced that he would be playing in Miami. In my opinion, this was a flat-out spit in the face to Cleveland. If he chose to leave Cleveland, he could have announced his decision privately, rather than crushing a number of fans hearts.

LeBron James sold out his hometown, and the Basketball Gods have noticed this.

The Miami Heat’s record is currently 9-8. They are 6th in the Eastern Conference, a dismal performance for a team with so many all-stars. Is this the common case of the Karma cold? No, it’s more than that.

I believe that the Miami Heat are in the situation they are due to their overconfidence. Just because they have 3 of the best individual players, does not mean that their team will automatically win numerous NBA championships. To win a championship, a team needs the following ingredients: a positive leader, team chemistry, and a great supporting cast. The Miami Heat currently has 2 leaders, LeBron James, and Dwayne Wade. Rather than having a Batman and Robin, the Miami Heat have two Batmans. Who should bring the ball down the court? Who should be the vocal leader? Who should take the last second shot? Unfortunately, the Miami Heat cannot answer these questions, and until they do, they will never live up to the high expectations that they set for themselves.

If we look back at history, the great teams that stand out are the ones with a single leader. Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls, Magic Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers, or Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics. This is not to say that they won numerous championships on their own, that is definitely not the case. They each had their own respective supporting cast, which helped them drive through the lane to the hoop of success. The key word is supporting cast. They were all alpha males in their own regard, but needed good players around them in order to succeed as a team. Additionally, they stayed with their teams for their entire NBA careers. Therefore, they were familiar with the team staff, organization, and there was a solid foundation of experience and chemistry within the team. Regarding the Miami Heat, they have only been together for a mere total of 17 games. That’s why it’s a no-brainer that this team is not living up to its full potential. It still has to develop, players have to learn to play with each other, and help each other out on the court, in order to get the win. However, as I stated before, the Miami Heat are a special case; very rarely in NBA history have two greats such as Wade and James played on the same team. Until one player steps down, and changes his role from ball hog to team player, the Miami Heat will succeed as a team.

Nevertheless, Miami Heat fans are still upset about their team’s current condition. Yet, it was inevitable that the Miami Heat would live up to all the hype they inflicted on themselves. The fact about hubris is that the excessive pride and self-confidence leads to demise. However, will the Miami Heat be an exception? Will they be able to pull themselves up from the depths of failure, into the land of triumph? We’ll have to wait and see how the NBA season plays out.

Cannibalism. Neverevereverever. -___-

After reading Anuraag’s post: Unprejudiced Violence, some thoughts came to my head regarding the concept of cannibalism. (http://theliteraturemachine.com/anuraag/2010/11/23/unprejudiced-violence/)

Anuraag, and members of his group agreed that cannibalism was a justified act for survival. Personally, I don’t believe that cannibalism is justified, regardless of its form or method, it is downright immoral and unjustifiable.

Yes, the father and son were living in terrible conditions. Yes, the father and son needed food. Yes, crops everywhere were dead and there were no animals to hunt.

However, cannibalism is not and should never be an option.

For example, take the Japanese War Crimes (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&docId=6963262)

“The Japanese started selecting prisoners and every day one prisoner was taken out and killed and eaten by the soldiers. At this place, the Japanese again started selecting prisoners to eat. Those selected were taken to a hut where their flesh was cut from their bodies while they were alive and they were thrown into a ditch where they later died”

Theses actions were called the Japanese War Crimes, and it was evidently immoral for the Japanese to eat the prisoners. Again, there were terrible conditions in war. Again, the soldiers needed food. However, cannibalism is still not the option.

I believe that killing other people for food or suicide ares not the only paths that McCarthy points out. Take the protagonists for instance, the father and son do not resort to cannibalism nor suicide, and still live for a significant amount of time. Eventually the father dies, but he was dying from the beginning of the novel, and is much older and wearied physically in comparison to the young boy.

Now, an individual killing another individual in order to survive is a different situation altogether. In war, people kill each other because if they don’t push the trigger first, they will be lying on the ground dead within the next second. It’s as simple as that. Cannibalism is eating another individual in order to survive. Anybody who is a cannibal is definitely the “bad guy”.

I encouraged all of you to read the following blog post, not from any student, but from Andrew Corbett. I’m certain that it will change your perspective on cannibalism as it changed mine. (http://andrewcorbett.blogspot.com/2009/07/is-cannibalism-immoral.html)

If it doesn’t, please comment below. I’m very curious to see what you have to say about cannibalism.

Love: A Temporary Madness

Throughout WE, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Road, the prominent theme is love. Whether love is present in a dystopian society, a supposed ideal society, or a post apocalyptic environment, it cannot be suppressed. This unconditional love significantly influences the decisions that characters make. Generally, love clouds the decision making processes of a character.

In WE, D-503 is supposedly already in “love” because he has a girlfriend, O-90. However when D-503 meets I-330, he becomes infatuated with her. He begins to dream about her, and think about her “irrationally”. In the One State, the dystopian society which D-503 inhabits, everything is rational and practical. Aspects such as love are considered irrational and are not present in the One State. Throughout the book, D-503 and I-330 meet in secret, committing particular actions that go against the One State. D-503 begins to dream about I-330 at night, and thinks of this as a symptom of mental illness because it is “irrational”. I-330 reveals to D-503 that she is a member of Mephi, a group that is plotting to bring down the One State. D-503 continues to do things that go against the mandates of the One State due to his attraction towards I-330, such as exploring the world outside the Green Wall. This growing passion, fatuous love for I-33o leads D-503 to making “irrational” decisions, clouding his thought processing.

In 1984, Winston falls in love with Julia over time. This love leads to Winston taking risks that he normally wouldn’t undergo. Not only is love illegal in the Ingsoc society, but Winston and Julia copulate for pleasure rather than for producing children. Winston continues to go against the authoritarian society led by Big Brother, but is eventually caught by the Thought Police. Winston’s love for Julia gets him thrown into Room 101, where he is tortured. This torture paralyzes Winston mentally; when he leaves Room 101, Winston is not the same person who entered.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred loses her love, Luke, when the authoritarian society of Gilead comes into power. Offred longs for her husband, but is heartbroken because in the back of her head, a voice is telling her that she will not see her husband again. Essentially, she is a widow, and widows are generally heartbroken people because they long for their lost love. Offred needs a distraction to get over her love for Luke. This causes her to accept the Commander’s invitation to meet her in his room. By befriending the Commander, Offred’s life in Gilead changes dramatically. The Commander exposes Offred to scrabble and other forms of education.  Offred goes against the authoritarian society of Gilead, going on “adventures” with the Commander, which she should not be doing, as she is a woman.

In The Road, the father and son share a strong bond for one another. Their paternal bond is strong, and their mutual, companionate love is what keeps them going in their post-apocalyptic environment. However, this love causes the father to make decisions that go against his conventional set of morals. For example, when a bandit puts a knife to the boy’s throat, and threatens to kill him, the father shoots the bandit. If the boy dies, the father will inevitably die; that is the father’s definition of love. Nothing will stop him from protecting his son, and he will eliminate any potential threat to his son’s condition.

Love is an abstract concept; there is no appropriate definition to describe the feeling, and it means something different to everyone. Nevertheless, love influences people. It can give people courage, or the mental strength to stand up to superiors and authority. However, people who generally make practical decisions may lose their sense of judgment if the person they love is somehow involved or related, as demonstrated in all four of these novels.

To what extent will YOU live up to good morals?



Throughout The Road, the father makes a number of questionable decisions. For example, the father strips a man of all his clothes, and leaves him to die in the bitter cold after the man is caught stealing his wagon. When the father and son encounter a 90 year old man travelling along the road, the father is unwilling to feed the dying man. In a post apocalyptic environment, filled with various diseases and groups of cannibals, does morality even exist?

The father in The Road is anything but a bad man. He is devoted to protecting his son, and even calls him “his God”. Despite their dreadful circumstances, the father refuses to give up or resort to cannibalism. However, the father’s immense love for his son clouds his sense of morality. In fact, if anything poses as a threat to his son, he will eliminate the threat—permanently

When a man steals the father’s wagon, filled with food, water, and blankets, the man is distraught. When the father catches the man, he forces him to return the wagon and take off all of his clothes by pointing a gun to him. The son is against his father’s decision, but the father takes no notice of his complaints, and continues to force the man to strip down to nothing but bare skin. This poses the question: is the “eye for an eye” mentality moral or immoral? After all, if the father did not catch the thief, he and his son would be left with no food, water, or shelter. It is only fair that they should leave the man in the same situation that he and his son would potentially be in, right?

Not necessarily. If our world operated like that, there would be war constantly. Eventually, someone must be lenient enough to forgive the other person.

When the father and boy encounter Ely, a 90 year old traveler, the father refuses to offer the old man any food. It’s a dog eat dog world after all isn’t it? Especially the world that they live in? Despite all this, the boy wants to help the old man.

Ironically, the boy was born into this “dog eat dog world”. He is completely oblivious to the semi-peaceful world that his father lived in. Nevertheless, the boy is more magnanimous than his father, and it is the boy’s benevolence that rubs off on his father.

Personally, I don’t blame the father for his particular decisions. After all, nobody can be trusted; supplies are scarce, diseases are widespread, and everyone wants to survive. The father took every precaution and made every decision to prolong their survival. However, the father fluctuated from behaving morally to immorally. To what extent can somebody live up to good morals filled in a world with death and hatred? The answer is that a person can to a very little extent; eventually the immorality that surrounds the person will influence him or her.

A Proposed Solution

What sets this feminist article apart from other feministic articles is that the author states that “if we are to free ourselves [women] from the dead weight that has once again been made out of femaleness, it is not ballots or lobbyists or placards that women will need first; it is a new way to see.”

The author believes that in order to free women from the boundaries set by society, women must first change their perspective. It is not enough to simply give more privileges to women and allot them forums to give women a “voice”. Additionally, the whole conception of successful or prosperous women being synonymous with “beautiful” women needs to change.

For example, the “$33 billion diet industry, the $20 billion cosmetics industry, the $300 million cosmetic surgery industry, and the $7 billion pornography industry. The prerequisite for all of these expensive professions is beauty; and if a woman does not have beauty, she can partake in the pricey cosmetic surgery industry to attain artificial beauty.

I believe that firstly, the perception of “beauty” should change. Currently, “beauty”, is intangible. In the words of Naomi Wolf, it is a myth. Very few women actually posses this beauty naturally. In fact, the majority of women are unhappy with how distant they are from this “beauty”, which leads to situations like anorexia, plastic surgery, or suicide.

Beauty should transfigure into individuality. Beauty must become known as something that is purely individual. People who are unique, people who stand out, those people are beautiful. Therefore, beauty would be more accessible to everyone. As long as somebody was distinctive, they would be accepted by society, and would be beautiful. By doing so, the problems that Wolf addresses could potentially be solved. No longer would stereotypes be an issue.  Every woman would be beautiful in her own way.            All advertisements and classical artworks of women would be different; there would be no conventional or accepted look. Through creating diversity, the whole concept of a particular facet for beauty would be eradicated.

The next step forward: discontinuing the production of "Barbie Dolls"

The Merriam-Webster dictionary has 3 definitions for the word doll:

1. A small-scale figure of a human being used especially as a child’s plaything
2. A pretty but often empty-headed young woman
3. An attractive person

The Barbie doll could be described with any 3 of these definitions, or with all of the definitions at once.

As mentioned by Susan Jane Gilman, the Barbie doll, “with their white-blond hair, burnt orange “Malibu” skin, unblinking turquoise eyes and hot-pink convertibles” is an exceptionally beautiful and glamorous figure of a human. There is no such thing as an “ugly” Barbie; however, there are Barbie’s that lack in the intelligence department.

In 1992, Mattel released Teen Talk Barbie, which spoke over 270 phrases. One of those phrases was, “Math class is tough”. This Barbie model received heavy criticism from the American Association of University Women. This particular Barbie model was only adding to the budding belief that women could not be both intelligent and beautiful simultaneously. Obviously, this perspective is false; nevertheless, the production of this particular Barbie doll ceased.

The doll plays an important role in the future of society. Dolls serve as companions for children, and many see themselves in the future as the Barbie doll that they posses. Many infants, especially girls, tell their parents that they want to be ballerinas or cowgirls when they grow up, because that is the Barbie that they have. Therefore, when children’s role models are 6 feet tall, have a 19-inch waist size, and a 33-inch hip size, it’s no wonder why so many women are unsatisfied with their current figure. These women resort to expensive procedures like plastic surgery, detrimental psychological disorders like anorexia, or even suicide.

In my honest opinion, the entire production of Barbie dolls should come to a close. Sure, slight changes are being made to the figure of the Barbie doll; for example, the waist size was expanded in 2000 to be more realistic. However, these changes are not adequate, and are not happening as rapidly as they should. What society needs is a whole new figurine. Scrap the Barbie doll, and give children a new doll to play with. A doll with not only a feasible body figure, but a charming personality as well. The Barbie doll’s beauty is solely based on its body. Has personality been removed from the determinants of beauty?

Gilman expanded on this train of thought, listing examples of some Barbies that she’d like to see produced; Barbies that were fat, lesbian, bisexual, human clones, Rabbis, scientific pundits, mathematicians, and so on and so forth. By creating a more diverse range of dolls, a varied assortment of personas and group of people will be accepted by society. Currently, there is only one ideal persona: the 6-foot tall, 19-inch waist, 33-inch hip size, blonde haired angel sent from heaven. It is our responsibility to rectify this misconception, by discontinuing the production of Barbies, and substituting its production with a varied collection of dolls with different personas.