OP #15
Turning a Blind Eye: Is Ignorance Ever Bliss?
In a speech entitled Is There an Artificial God? held at Magdelene College in Cambridge, Douglas Adams asked his audience to “… imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for” (Adams). In this part of his speech, Adams was addressing the tendency of the world’s population to ignore their surroundings and to go on with life without a worry for the future.
Speech: Douglas Adams’ Is There an Artificial God?, held at Magdelene College, Cambridge, 1998.
Biography: Concise biography of Douglas Adams.
I think that Adams’ metaphor of the puddle is extremely relevant in our world today as we, like the puddle, are paying no attention to many things that threaten us and our existence, in the hope that they will just go away. What I am mostly alluding to is global warming, which—though we have scientific evidence proving it exists and that it is doing damage to our planet—people continue to insist on ignoring. Adams addresses the idea in his speech that instead of facing the unstoppable and merely adjusting their perspectives, people have an inclination toward completely avoiding the topic. This is perfectly understandable and is part of human nature, but it is an attitude that too many in our world—in our country—have adopted and live their lives by.
Living this way does not allow for necessary measures to be taken against an impending disaster (or whatever the case may be) or even—in the case of something inevitable—just the changing of one’s mentality in preparation for the event. To those who may argue that this philosophy of embracing the inevitable (or maybe trying to do something about it) is—in the long run—useless as a person would spend life worrying and not living, I shake my head because really opening one’s eyes to reality not only broadens one’s perspective on life but allows one to enjoy it more fully, no matter what it entails.
Proposition: When faced with the unpreventable, people often have a tendency to turn a blind eye and hope fate will leave them alone.
A/N: Mrs. Holmgren—I’m not sure if there was ever a maximum placed on the OP quotes (there isn’t one on the Reflective Learning Site), so I’m sorry that this one is rather long; I just really, really wanted to write on it.
CP #12
May 17, 2010, update: We were assigned to write a portrait of a bedroom for English and this is what I came up with. It’s hard with this kind of thing to walk the line between painfully boring and Gossip Girl dramatic and I guess I decided to err on the side of the drama. Looking back I wish that I had taken the challenge of making a boring room interesting, but too late now.
The window bangs open against the wall behind it, letting in a gust of wind which swirls through the room, ripping a few old newspaper clippings from their places on the wall. The wind subsides and as it does the curtains fall back into place and the clippings come to rest under the bed, whose sheets and blankets are twisted and hanging off the side. The clock on the bedside table flashes 12:00, though the sky outside clearly indicates otherwise. One wall of the room is occupied by an enormous map of Canada with red, blue, and green pins peppering it. The lower left hand corner of the map curls up hiding Vancouver from view. The remaining space on that wall is taken up by a myriad of yellowing and torn newspaper clippings all seemingly completely random—sports scores from twenty years before, an earthquake in Chile, the New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker showtimes, an interview with the author of a bestseller, stock market reports from every month since October of 2013, a story detailing the success of a movie released November 13th, 2009.
On the opposite wall above a cluttered desk, hangs a mirror whose face is turned to the wall. Flanking it, are two framed blueprints of what look like The Whitehouse and La Défense. Thrown carelessly across half the desk is a street map of London with a bold red line traced on it in Sharpie. A closer look shows that this line follows Downing Street. The rest of the desk is mess of old gum wrappers, broken pencils, crumpled bits of graph and lined paper, torn computer printouts, several calculators, and a toppled stack of newspapers in several languages. The topmost headline blares: Nuclear Bomb D—but the rest is covered by a long cold cup of coffee in a mug which reads World’s Best Dad on the side.
The desk chair is not in its place before the desk, but instead leans haphazardly against the opposite wall, a crumpled black rain jacket on its seat. Lying beneath one of the chair’s wheels is an eighteen month calendar open to April. Every day before Monday the 27th has a neat black X through it, while the 27th bears a hurried squiggle. A note sticks out from between the pages of a paperback novel which lies face down upon the first week of April.
It begins: Jean, I am taking—
The handle turns and the door opens.
