Friday, January 13, 2012

The Pretties #5

“ ‘Left alone, human beings are a plague. They multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything they touch. Without the operation, human beings always become Rusties’...
She reached out and stroked Tally’s cheek, her fingers strangely hot in the winter air. ‘Special Circumstances...we are the cure.’ “
Pg 280-281



Reaction: This part is kind of creepy because it has a certain amount of truth behind it. Dr. Cable is kind of right when she says that humans 'multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything they touch'. But to think that the cure to that is the hollow beings that they call 'pretties' is kind of crazy. Why should there even be a cure to the way we are in the first place? I don't agree with a lot of the things we as people do but that doesn't mean we need to tweak everyone's brain into mulch to solve that. It would make a lot more sense to try to better ourselves in our own terms instead of living these empty lives that the 'pretties' carry out.


Analysis: This passage shows the thought process and what you might call 'justifications' of the 'Special Circumstances'. They feel like in the end they are just helping everybody and that's their job to maintain this type of structure that they enforce in this society. The author also calls out on the biggest problems we have today which is our exponential population increase, resource overuse, and war. The parallelism between our society and theirs is that by taking away all the things we do wrong today they add completely new things that they themselves do wrong. The 2 civilizations are almost polar opposites of each other contrasting each other's goods and bads.

1 comment:

  1. I thought the same, and then I thought of an old saying, you know like the easy way out. Instead of change, which is hard, simply eliminating and then maybe creating a new solution seems to be the norm even in this society. It's like a relationship, two people meet and if they want to step up both people (or more) have to change a little so that the relationship can survive the differences and problems that are sure to rise up. So many relationships fail this way, instead of changing one person leaves and has a relationship with another person instead.

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