Body Count

Towards the end of the Maus series, Vladek takes out pictures of his relatives and recounts their lives to Artie. Vladek shows the destruction brought upon his family by the holocaust through his recounts of the people in these pictures.  Some die in the holocaust while others commited suicide after surviving it. The amount of deaths and tragedies that occured in Vladek's family can represent what the families of Jewish people experienced in general during the holocaust.  The panels are also overlapped by the stacks of photos piling together. Assuming that each photo represented a family member, Art uses the photos to show the amount of people in his family that had to experience the holocaust. Art confirms the existence of these people through the photos. They are gone but not forgotten,  the pictures are a way for Vladek and the descendants of Vladek to remember the deceased. Like the memorial of the holocaust, it is a reminder of the nightmares humanity is capable to create and the consequences it brings upon us. We may never be able to achieve full empathy with those who went through then holocaust but we do understand the sentimental value behind each picture and each serial number on the holocaust memorial. Hopefully it will make us avoid causing something similar to the holocaust from repeating again. The story behind each of the photos ultimately tell the story of the resilience and strength of the Jewish people since they suffered heavy loses but still continue to live on.

Social requirements

During our seminar this week,  we came across a cold read about a person who has all the money he can want but does not live a happy life.  This seems peculiar,  even if there is the cliche that money can't buy happiness most people still disagree with it.  They reason that they can buy things that make them happy or use their money to achieve their state of happiness. The passage counters this claim by emphasising the social aspect of happiness. In the psychology realm,  Maslow's hierarchy of needs states that after physiological and safety needs,  a human hunts for the sense of love and belonging. The author in the book obviously has the physiological and safety portions satisfies,  but he complains of not getting the attention or the treatment he wants.  Wealth probably made his life worse,  since in our society wealth is somewhat considered a status.  This status may have caused other people to distance themselves from him since they live different lifestyles and have different interests.  A wealthy person's idea of having fun may differ significantly with a normal persons idea of fun, since the wealthy guy has no budget for fun. Achieving the status of being wealthy can go both ways,  either one gets isolated from society,  or one becomes happier with the added wealth. The best way to become the latter is probably to be careful on how you get wealthy, since relationships with other people do play a critical role in our lives.

Lobsters in pain

The article that we read in class introduces us to the cruelty of killing lobsters in order to eat them.  More importantly,  it show us the disillusion that we pertain when judging other things. When we feel sorry for the lobster,  it is almost always because we put a human being in the lobster's position to get an understanding of the situation.  This connection is flawed,  since the autonomy of the lobster differs entirely from our autonomy.  Thus the feelings and cognition that a lobster pertains is different to what a human pertains. The person who feels empathy for the lobster feels sorry for the lobster because they themselves picture humans being cooked alive.  This does not mean that lobsters don't feel pain Like the author said,  lobsters can be organisms that feel pain in a different way.  Maybe pain does not bother them that much and it is just a mild discomfort such as an itch.  However, comparing it to humans is wrong. If a person lost empathy to human beings, then he or she probably wouldn't feel for a lobster. This is an un-fixable in human nature. We try to make a connection to objects even if it means making the connections illogical. 

Paraphrasing life

After watching the Mrs Dalloway movie in class,  I have gained a better understanding of the book and the story of Mrs Dalloway. The story doesn't seem to be about Mrs Dalloway as much as it is about the representation of an entire life of a generic person displayed in the events of one day. Woolf starts off the book with Clarissa all happy with buying flowers for her,  representing the happinesses of life that occur  in social interactions. Septimus's PTSD outbreaks represent the guilt and pain in life and how sometimes it can be so painful that people consider suicide. His death is Woolf's perspective of how there is no wrong choosing death in some occasions and how the death of one can influence those who are alive . Clarissa's reunion with Peter displays the joy, sorrow, and nostalgia of seeing someone again after a prolonged period of time. Elizabeth represents the feelings of having children, and Clarissa's quarrels with Ms Killman represents the conflicts with one's enemies throughout life. Richard and Rezia symbolize marriage and love for their spouse. Sally is the rebellious impulse that we have had in at least one point of our lives. Big Ben, even though not shown in the movie, shows that as all these events and emotions trigger in our lives,  time will always continue to flow.

Ignorance

PTSD is integrated into Mrs Dalloway through Septimus. He is a World War I veteran who lost his best friend in combat.  Septimus has survivor's guilt afterwards and feels like he should die like the rest of his comrades. His worried wife Rezia takes him to a doctor who gives Septimus advice in an extremely insensitive way. He acts like Septimus is an object and talks to Rezia instead of directly addressing Septimus. Septimus grows to hate the doctor and in his final moments screams "I give it you!" to Dr Wilson as he leaps off a building. The doctor could've successfully helped Septimus if he had shown a little compassion or sympathy.  Dr Wilson does not understand the reality of war.  Only people who have been in combat knows what it's like being shot at and shoot back to essentially kill a human equal. In conclusion the doctor did not determine Septimus' condition and approached Septimus the wrong way, ultimately worsening his intent to suicide. Dr Wilson represents those who judge others before getting to know them.

Pessimistic thinking

The book Mrs. Dalloway makes us contemplate about death, a theme which most people view as negative. The book also views death as negative from the constant allusions to the battlefield in World War I with flaming bodies and mustard gas; to Rezia's anxious denial that her husband, Septimus, is actually suicidal. In addition,  all characters in the book almost never think about or talk about the future.  Everything is about the past and how things are now in the present. The characters seem afraid to think about the future and thus present the likelihood that they are also suicidal in a way.  Peter comes back to see Clarissa even though he knows that it will cause pain and imbalance in his seemingly happy life. His life is ironic, though,  being a missionary in India he makes the wife of an Indian major commit adultery; after that he comes back to London only to regain his repressed feelings for Clarissa. All of this happens while he tries to find a lawyer to divorce his Indian lover. Clarissa also seems to be suicidal or at least self harming since she was obviously in love with Peter when he proposed to her but she rejected him in order to marry Richard. Now she grieves about how people only judge her by her face value of being Richards wife. All main characters in this book have severe problems in their lives that originate from arrogant decisions in their past or from incidents that caused trauma to them.
Death may seem like a solution but that is up to each person to decide for themselves. The idea of death is different in everyone's mind.

Insight on perception over break

Over our extremely elongated break,  I came across an advertisement video while wandering aimlessly in YouTube land.  The video was about a magician, or illusionist, playing magic tricks on this famous Indian Guru. After demonstrating the magic trick, the magician and the guru had a really insightful talk about perception. The magician said that his job is to alter how people perceive things to make them seem magical and furthermore asked the guru what he thought about perception. This is what the guru said, "The word perception in social transactions are used as my perception compared to your perception. In reality it is my distortion to your distortion...  perception means to grasp something by the way it is." there is only one perspective in this world and it is the literal state of how everything is.  Each person has different distortions of the reality of the world they live in. Some may believe that eventually people will achieve equality and there will be no sexism and racism , while others may over exaggerate reality and think that there will never be equality and those who try to achieve it will fail and suffer. Notice how I projected a distortion while presenting the two examples, maybe people never will achieve equality and it wasn't over exaggerated after all. How one see the world will always be different from how others see the world; our distortions are formed by many factors such as denial of what is too painful to acknowledge and lack of experience or insight.  Everyone carries a distortion of perception and it's possible that nobody will ever perceive our world with the true perspective.

The Cost Of Peace

Alexie's portrayal of his father in the in class reading sends an important message about how to obtain peace. In his autobiography, he ironically illustrates father beating on a national guard while protesting for peace. The irony in this incident is that Alexie's father is using violence to obtain peace. Even though this may seem ironic and hypocritical, it does seem disturbingly accurate considering the history of the human race. Like many other organisms,  humans have been fighting against each other since the beginning of time. Therefore, it is natural that we are still committing violent actions towards each other in present day,since it is almost innate for us to do so. There is one flaw to this design though; unlike other organisms, people have technologies that are capable of inflicting devastating damage to each other and also to nature. Therefore , the consequences of human to human fighting becomes out of balance. Nature can no longer bear the collateral damage that modern warfare inflicts and thus becomes scarred by the aftermath of war. Does this mean that we will eventually stop fighting each other? Highly unlikely. Through the recount  Alexie's dad,  we learn that the most likely and easiest way to achieve peace is through violence. Therefore we are stuck to choosing whether to do nothing and go to war, or try to obtain and still go to war. The depressing truth is that either way, the world will be damaged heavily because humans roam on it.

The Power Of One

Through the various in class discussions, our class has concluded that the achievements individuals can determine the reputation of an entire community. However, the question arises of whether this should be considered a legitimate representation of a community of people. The generalization of a group or race can lead to severe and unjustified actions and treatments towards that group. Such scenarios have occurred to American-Japenese people after Pearl Harbor;and also to Arabic people after the nine-eleven incident and the war on terrorism in the Middle East. Sure, Louis's boxing match helped the Black community gain power in society;but Joe also had the choice to display his race as weaker than his opponent and worsen the situation for the Black community. The fate of multiple individuals depending on the actions of a single person simply seems unfair; especially since our country lives by the belief that everyone has their own freedom to decide the outcome of their lives. Even so, the human mind has a tendency to engage in procedures such representative heuristics to judge people by the stereotypes and instinctively create a potentially fake profile of a person whom they never met before. This is a curse and a blessing in ways, since it saves time and lets the brain operate more efficiently while it can lead us to misjudge some people. Thus, we as humans may never escape the cycle of misjudging and mistreating people.