#now we need to rape other planets too??? for what???????? resources?? instead of focusing on the actual renewable resources already here??? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sirlorde7-blog · 5 years

Text

The UK is such a mess.

Poverty, homelessness, fewer jobs for un/low-skilled workers, kids starving, old people dying, more kids in care, Brexit, adult social care and the NHS!

Parents struggling financially face many problems, not least of all potentially and unintentionally placing additional stress on children. Kids growing up poor understand that no-one knows where the next meal is coming from, or if the electricity will stay on, or if they’ll get lunch during the summer holidays. Not to mention there is no money for extra-curricular activities, day trips out or even a new football to kick around in order to stay out of trouble. (https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/dec/02/growing-up-poor-britains-breadline-kids-review-the-lives-stolen-by-poverty)

Too many children live in temporary accommodation, often sharing one room with siblings and parents. They are expected to focus at school, whilst teachers apply pressure to “perform” like monkeys - sit this test, pass that exam, all so the school can justify itself and draw down funding. Our children are more stressed than ever and we’re raising a generation filled with mental and physical illnesses and conditions that a few decades ago hadn’t even been heard of! “The most recent quarterly statistics recorded 84,740 households in temporary accommodation at the end of March 2019. This represents a 77% increase since December 2010, where the use of temporary accommodation hit its lowest point since 2004″ (https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN02110).

Countless parents struggling with with finance, work, housing, accessing support, healthcare and more, may also be suffering with mental/physical health conditions; and therefore, the whole family suffers. And before anyone gets on my case about people on benefits, most of the 4.1 million children living in poverty have at least one parent working! We've created a whole new 'class' of people in the UK in recent years - the "working poor" (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/04/four-million-british-workers-live-in-poverty-charity-says).

However, companies want their profits and too many large corporations make millions, if not billions every year, whilst desperate people cling to work, hoping their child isn’t sent home sick from school, praying their car makes it on the little bit of fuel they’ve just put in; and plugging away for hours on end without any food because there is nothing in the cupboard to make up a packed-lunch and their kids are receiving free school meals because there’s just no other choice.

There are no council houses, social housing is a joke (waiting lists approx. 7-10yrs) in some local authority areas, and private rents are through the roof. Our NHS is slashing services, and closing clinics and local hospitals, which reduces the provision to those most in need; including mental health teams and adult social care (https://nhsfunding.info/symptoms/10-effects-of-underfunding/cuts-to-frontline-services/).

However, children’s Social Services appear to doing just fine in the sense that they’re busy enough accusing parents of abuse and/or neglect, simply because they’re battling ‘life’ on a daily basis. They’re very quick to remove children from ‘good enough’ parents, fast-track the paperwork to court and apply for removal orders left right and centre; leading to private Fostering and Adoption agencies cashing in! This video highlights just some of the issues with Social Services and the system as a whole: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7TcFWqKja8).

Trying to 'survive' creates stress, which has many wide-reaching physical and mental implications; from hormone imbalance, metabolic disorders and weight gain, to fatigue and eating problems. Many parents do go without so that their kids can eat, yet they still gain weight and lose energy, feeling exhausted every day, simply due to the stress they're under. Choosing between heating and eating creates health issues, with malnutrition identified in the 5th richest nation in the world and the elderly dying of being unable to afford the gas fire (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/cold-weather-uk-winter-deaths-europe-polar-vortex-a8224276.html).

The Labour Party, under Jeremy Corbyn, aim to privatise energy, water, rail and the postal service, as well as some other utilities and services; however, they need to go one or two steps further. The NHS offer should extend to in-home care and the running and regulation of care homes (with those who can afford to pay, doing so) and the government should regain control of children’s services, with private fostering and adoption companies being take out of existence (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/23/revealed-companies-running-inadequate-uk-care-homes-make-113m-profit).

Unless something changes on a national scale, with a new government and new direction, the mental health crisis is only going to get worse, along with other social problems such as excessive drinking and drug-taking (used as a form of escape), increased crime rates and gang membership, and anti-social behaviour (often due to boredom), etc. Parenting hasn’t become worse, people are fighting to survive! Nurses are going to food banks, fire fighters work second jobs; Police recruits are low caliber due to the starting pay offered and standards being lowered during recruitment drives. Teachers are watching kids fall asleep in class because they’re not eating and sleeping properly.

You only need to take a look at some news headlines to realise just how out of control everything is. On top of the national political and socio-economic issues facing the UK, privateers are pressing on with a needless and expensive high-speed rail network - HS2 is now an £88 BILLION pound project! Imagine what could be done with all that money (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/03/hs2-to-be-delayed-by-up-to-five-years). It would certainly solve a few problems.

So whilst business commuters might, eventually, be able to arrive at their destination 30mins earlier than before, the general population is duct-taping their shoes together and sewing holes in socks, just so they can go to work to earn enough to barely keep a roof over their head and food on the table, and the big businesses just keep getting richer (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/dec/03/uk-six-richest-people-control-as-much-wealth-as-poorest-13m-study).

And what about the planet? Are poor people really interested in recycling, sustainable living and providing a nurturing garden habitat to attract wildlife (for those lucky enough to have access to a garden of course)? Some might be, but in the main, people are overworked, underpaid, stressed beyond belief, exhausted and trying not to yell at the kids or argue with their partner because everyone feels the same and is rubbing each other up the wrong way.

The UK desperately needs radical change. Never mind the disaster that is Brexit, the more urgent issue is “survival”. Charities, foodbanks and the like help, but they should even need to exist. There is more than enough money, food and water to go round; it’s simply a case of sharing the wealth.

Controlled procreation should also be on the agenda. Not the systematic theft of children by Social Services, ‘upcycling’ kids to ‘better’ families to reduce the number of underclass and bring down the welfare bill. But the responsible, educated, proactive approach from people choosing to have children. Ideally, a couple would stay together and have up to 2 children, live in a safe, warm and comfortable home, raise them well and encourage them to do the same. However, many are choosing to have 3 or 4 children, and in some countries many more, and the planet is overpopulated. Yes there are issues around adult separation and rape case where the pregnancy isn’t terminated, but this focuses on more general planned parenthood.

Birth control and education must be provided worldwide and the relevant support provided to parents who need help - often, it’s simply a little guidance or support, but instead, in the UK they’re often faced with meetings, court appearances and parenting assessments, as they are accused of not being able to cope. As a human race, there is a responsibility not to over-produce more humans! Earth is running out of resources and the air and water is becoming more polluted. Eventually, people will be hunting each other and fighting over scraps because everything else is gone. Millions will have died off through dehydration or starvation. Medical services won’t be available. Money will not longer be of value - unless of course you can digest it to gain a few dollars worth of energy.

Also, we’re so intent on living longer, curing disease and holding onto pregnancies which otherwise would have self-terminated; yet we’re overrunning the planet with more and more elderly, sick, disabled humans needing to be cared for. We’re creating more problems than we’re solving and we’re not being responsible. We all want to keep loved ones close, but can we afford their care, or do we have somewhere to place them until they finally pass? Of course Cancer is a multi-billion-pound industry and therefore, sick people equals profit for big pharma. China had a one-child policy which created many issues for a long time, however, they reduced their population and increased it to 2 only as recently as 2016 (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2214179-chinas-two-child-policy-linked-to-5-million-extra-babies-in-18-months/).

There is no easy answer. Low-skilled jobs are replaced by self-serve checkouts, Universal Credit has plunged thousands of people into unnecessary debt, the rising cost of living is not reflected in wages, people are living in unsafe properties because they have nowhere else to go and others perish in fires due to inadequate building regulations - 2yrs on from Grenfell and still no changes have been made (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/03/fires-grenfell-towers-combustible-cladding).

The poor simply don’t matter and currently, there are too many of us for the government’s liking, so it’s doing it’s best to kill us off. It’s a Social Cleansing agenda which serves the richest, most powerful in society. Many of us will live on, clinging to work, hoping for a brighter day; all the while putting more money into the off-shore bank accounts of the elite from which they buy their yachts and private jets, champagne, cocaine and pretty boys and girls to play with (https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/anneke-lucass-harrowing-tale-of-sex-trafficking-am/).

This world is SICK and getting sicker. We’re hoping for change. We’re hoping for a UK Labour government and for Donald Trump to be removed from the White House - that would be a good start. We’re then hoping to cascade the transformation around the world, to lead by example and have the 1% share the wealth they have accumulated through the enslavement of the general population - starting with paying Tax.

If you truly care about your future and that of your children, take action:

- vote Labour on 12th December 2019.

- vote for a decent POTUS candidate.

- boycott big pharma and big corporations - buy local, reuse, recyle and repurpose. Use repair cafes and similar to swap, make good or otherwise utilise products which already exist instead of buying new.

- help your neighbour - buy in bulk, cook and eat together to reduce costs and waste, plant your own food, eat less meat/become vegan. Cook in bulk and freeze meals for another day.

- responsibility manage household energy consumption and look for solar/wind options.

- carefully plan and be responsible for just one or two children, lessening the load on this planet and your bank balance.

- be happy with what you have - go charity-shop shopping instead of buying new; move things around or swap rooms about instead of redecorating every couple of years. If you cannot sell an unwanted item, give it away, don’t bin it.

- stop going mad at Christmas and reduce down what you buy for Easter, Halloween and other occasions. Wrap your gifts in newspaper or recyclable materials.

- use metal or glass water bottles and refill instead of buying plastic all the time.

- understand the law! You never know when you might be fighting a battle with the powers that be - become your own detective and your own legal team. From employment law to the Children Act 2004, familiarise yourself. Legislation touches EVERY part of our lives, from driving to renting a house, and from buying food to taking out a mobile phone contract. You need to know how to protect yourself every step of the way. The authorities (currently) are NOT on your side, so make sure you’ve got your own back!

1 note · View note

e-fanuc · 6 years

Text

A formerly suicidal Salt Lake City firefighter got help — and now he’s urging other first responders to consider therapy

After a sleepless two days at the firehouse, Capt. Mike Stevens trudged up the stairs to his bedroom and pulled out his .40-caliber handgun. He sat on the edge of his bed and began to make a mental list of the reasons he should end his own life and the reasons he shouldn’t.

He thought his wife would be able to find a better husband and, if he died, she could take the life insurance and pay off the house. He felt he was no longer making a difference. He sat there holding the gun for about 15 minutes, ticking through reasons to shoot himself.

But then, like a lightning bolt, one thought knocked aside his grim list — “There are people on this planet that I haven’t pissed off yet.”

He’d struggled with depression and nightmares for years, but therapy eventually helped him work through trauma accumulated over his lengthy career as an emergency medical technician and then a firefighter in Salt Lake City. Today, he urges other firefighters to protect their mental health.

“I kept my demons hidden for many years,” Stevens said. “I didn’t want to infect anyone else, that was my train of thought. There’s some logic to that, but it finds its way out one way or another.”

Stevens will join a panel of first responders on Thursday, May 24, at 7 p.m. at the Salt Lake City Main Library to talk about the toll their jobs can take on their mental health. The free event is being presented by The Salt Lake Tribune, which recently published “Officer in Distress,” a series that focused on West Jordan Detective Brent Jex and his guilt over the death of a friend in uniform.

Jex can’t appear at the Trib Talk Live event due to professional responsibilities. Instead, Tribune Editor Jennifer Napier-Pearce will interview Stevens, a 29-year veteran of the city Fire Department, along with Sgt. Lisa Pascadlo, a peer support coordinator for the Salt Lake City Police Department; state Rep. Lee Perry, a lieutenant with the Utah Highway Patrol; and Shante Johnson, a spokeswoman with the Utah Fraternal Order of Police and the widow of Draper Sgt. Derek Johnson, who was killed in the line of duty in 2013.

The stories of Jex and Stevens are similar. They are big, imposing men who grew up with an instinct to help others. They came to their respective professions early and with great enthusiasm. And over time, what they saw on the job, particularly the deaths of young children, weighed them down.

Around the year 2000, Stevens was a member of an emergency crew sent to a downtown apartment building where a boy, about 1 year old, had stopped breathing. They gave him CPR and rushed him to Primary Children’s Hospital where Stevens sat with his devastated parents. The boy died.

About a decade later, Stevens responded to a call after a father had taken cold medication, fallen deeply asleep and rolled onto his 18-month-old son. Stevens said he felt a “sinking feeling” as he handed the boy off to medics. That boy died, too.

Stevens remembers a young man dragged behind a TRAX train when it snagged the bag he was carrying over his shoulder. Stevens and his fellow firefighters picked up the man’s remains and put them in small plastic bags.

He says, generally, he can handle the blood, the car wrecks and near drownings. “But being able to say it doesn’t affect you isn’t exactly true.”

No major event led to the suicidal thoughts that spurred Stevens to pull out his .40-caliber in 2011. It was an erosion of his self-esteem and a lack of sleep, he said, driven by reliving past calls that he tends to describe as “not so good.”

In the months afterward, he tried to cope with times of stress by going the gym and chopping firewood. But then, about two years later, the nightmares came back, becoming more frequent, more alarming, until he was wracked by horrors every time he drifted off. He’d dream of the dad who rolled over on his son, and then his mind would morph that tragedy into something worse — the father died too, or maybe everyone in the house.

He ended up seeing a therapist who specializes in EMDR, which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. The therapy is used frequently for those who suffer from post-traumatic stress or similar mental health problems, including members of the military, rape survivors and first responders.

In EMDR, a therapist breaks down traumatic events into the ways a person experienced them, asking a patient to recall visual images and body sensations and hoping to help change how the brain responds to these memories.

It helped Stevens eliminate the nightmares and moderate his mood swings. He still isn’t comfortable around strangers, and has moved into a fifth-wheel camper in a remote part of Utah. He is still trying to rebuild relationships with his family.

He urges his fellow firefighters to take advantage of department resources, including peer support teams and psychiatrists available for phone conversations.

At the urging of Battalion Chief Mike Fox, researchers at the University of Utah launched an experiment called “Mind Shield” in 2017, where all firefighters participated in three one-hour training sessions meant to reduce suicidal thoughts, depression and substance abuse. That study is still underway, said lecturer Rich Landward, with the College of Social Work.

Aaron Burgin created a nonprofit called Suicide Sucks after his brother, Scott, died by suicide in 2009. The idea was to push suicide prevention ads and links higher in search results when a person types suicide-related keywords into Google or any other search engine. Burgin’s group also created YouTube videos. He asked Stevens, his stepfather, to talk directly to other firefighters.

In the video, posted in May 2017, Stevens said: “The stigma of going to seek therapy, it is not there anymore. It is more commonplace now than you think. Set your pride on the shelf and get the help you need.

“You are here for a reason. We all got into Fire and EMS to help others,” he said. “You have a gift most people on this planet don’t. You would lay your life on the line for someone you don’t know because you give a s—. Don’t take that away from someone who still needs you.”

Source Article

The post A formerly suicidal Salt Lake City firefighter got help — and now he’s urging other first responders to consider therapy appeared first on E FANUC.

Read full post at: http://www.e-fanuc.com/a-formerly-suicidal-salt-lake-city-firefighter-got-help-and-now-hes-urging-other-first-responders-to-consider-therapy/

0 notes

fvisualvomits · 8 years

Text

‘We need to consider seriously the fact that even the most dystopic visions of science fiction of the last half century cannot replicate events that have actually taken place, events that we have seen, recorded, and reproduced. We don't need to speculate. We know what the end of the world looks like. We know because we've seen it, and we've seen it because it's happened.’ – (James Berger) Use Berger’s statement as the starting point for an essay in which you discuss representations of apocalyptic reality in the twenty-first century in relation to one of the texts we have studied on this module. (68)

Berger’s quote is frankly idealistic in analysing dystopian literature. It is not the replication but the representation of a degenerated life that strikes the reader towards negative emotions. Failing to do so, how can a text be ‘dystopic’? Cormac McCarthy probes the limitations of the dystopian novel with his 2006 work The Road. He uses Foucault’s theory of biopolitics to explore the binaries of man vs. man, weighing the taxonomy of human life in segregated examples of ‘any common migratory killer’[1], the enemy, and ‘they’[2], our protagonists. This is of particular relevance to the present via the Black Lives Matter movement. He also explores man vs. nature in an attempt to explore catalysts of apocalypse and human responsibility. McCarthy contrasts the landscape of his futuristic novel to our own. The implied similarities strike us with fear of the unknown, as terrorism and nuclear warfare advance. Through ‘advancement’, the idea of Dante’s Inferno is introduced, wherein progression forward is actually a regression toward hell. This leads to permeating dystopian thought as the futility and danger of perceived development is unveiled. McCarthy inverts conventional tropes create a dystopian future that warns us towards protecting our present.

The Road is arguably one of the most important biopolitical novels of the twenty-first century in dissecting the man vs. man binary. I use biopolitics to mean ‘a politics… that takes hold of and controls the phenomena of life’[3], focusing on the branch of thanatopolitics[4]. Foucault argues that the mobilisation of the entire population ‘for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity[5]’ became normalised in the 20th century. Instead of politics governing McCarthy’s survivors in a regulated society, a sheer lack of ethical morality allows for Homo sapiens critique. McCarthy’s mysterious apocalyptic event has led to transcendence beyond conceivable notions of barbarity, encompassing graphic cannibalism. A ‘phalanx’[6] of cannibals is eager to hunt fellow survivors, possessing ‘slaves in harness’ and ‘a supplementary consort of calamities’[7]. This imagery provides a colonial portrayal of the cannibal trope unsettled by the setting of the United States of America. The Declaration of Independence states ‘all men are created equal’ yet the ‘land of the free’ has regressed into hellish slavery and rape despite a futuristic, typically progressive, setting. The modern post-colonial allusion sets the Western World apart from the Other, laws that lay illegality to such actions regulate the current West. McCarthy thus inverts such tropes to unsettle our preconceptions. Western consumerism has surpassed materialism to involve the consumption of fellow humanity. Foucault’s biopolitics is disregarded as ‘purification of the race, especially as it takes place in Nazism’[8] is ignored for mindless slaughter within the concordant race. McCarthy resultantly implies that fatidic events eradicate the possession/preservation of life binary. Foucault states ‘power took possession of life in the nineteenth century’[9] models of power play have been enacted since ancient scenarios such as war[10]. While prior biopolitical warfare was once enacted for land/slave conquests, twenty-first-century terrorism involves gratuitous murder. Fred Dallymayr suggests that:

“This is probably the most disturbing aspect of our age: not only the fact of widespread destruction, but the presence of geopolitical agents and agendas deliberately pursuing the aim of “nihilation ” or the destruction of life”[11]

Dallymayr’s quote captures the fragility of human life in a present day, possessing new methods of human extermination. At least six countries[12] are in possession of ‘the fact’ (nuclear weapons) capable of committing mass slaughter. The simultaneous use of said weapons would render the population of the earth greatly reduced, and the landscape drastically altered akin to McCarthy’s land. I will return to how McCarthy’s landscape bears signs of nuclear winter.

Expanding upon Dallymayr’s citation, we have entered an age wherein the murder of innocent civilians is encouraged by terrorist cells such as ISIS representing ‘geopolitical agents’. However, in McCarthy’s novel, the witnessed ‘nihilation’ reaches new bounds. We observe ‘a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit’[13]. This is a graphic display of abased biopolitics and a contemporary link can be drawn to the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite the conception of the movement in 2013, American history has witnessed a racial divide due to the victimized nature of black civilians. Similarly to the murder of the infant, the movement is based on a young boy, Treyvon Martin, who was contentiously murdered in cold blood. Instead of the preservation of the young, ensuring the continuation of civilisation, the young are being hunted towards extinction.

The biopolitics in the case of the man/boy is in direct opposition to the majority. This binary involves the protective, nurturing nature of father over son. The man’s purpose in life is the preservation of his son’s existence, to the extent, ‘the boy was all that stood between him and death’[14], and that if his son perished he would ‘want to die too’[15]. This is the inversion of the ‘bad guys’[16], slaughtering all in their path. Instead of prioritising his own life, the man extenuates his role as ‘mother’ to the boy for her departure. This is exemplified by the experience with the ‘big man’[17], stating his consort are eating ‘whatever they can find’[18] before grabbing the boy. Not only does the man kill this predator, he must ‘wash a dead man’s brains out of his [the boy’s] hair. That is my job’[19]. The man is desperate to keep his son both physically and metaphorically ‘clean’, reinforced by his reminder that ‘the things you put into your head are there forever’[20]. He yearns for his son’s mind to remain unpolluted like the landscape, free of defeatist thought as he always takes the ‘positive’ route, ‘it’s all right’ and ‘it’s okay’[21]. Life preservation amongst our protagonists retains similarity as such to our present Western values; to the extent, the man must promise his son ‘we won’t hurt the dog’[22]. McCarthy uses his dystopian text to procure the empathy and instils fear via familiarity. As D.H Lawrence states, ‘society, now and forever must be ruled or governed’[23]. The importance of this biopolitically is apparent through the events of the novel, yet this point raises questions. Who should do the ruling? Who is responsible for the consequences?

Expanding Dallymer’s theory of worldwide ‘nihilation’, we can look at the damage being enacted upon our earth. McCarthy comments upon environmental degradation by focusing upon the scenery of forests and ocean landscapes. Humanity has stripped the land bare of all resources. There are only scenes such as the ‘remains of an orchard’[24] and ‘barren slopes’[25]. These adjectives connote the severity of which the land is devoid of life. The aforementioned ‘bad man’ who attempts to kidnap the son even has ‘a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an ill-formed notion of their appearance’[26]. The insinuation is that the birds have been gone for so long that even an animal so simply shaped cannot be properly replicated. Similarly, the bodies of water they encounter such as the dammed lake to the sea have ‘nothing’[27] left in terms of food.

Figure 1: The Road (2009) Figure 2: Amazon Deforestation

The Road[28] opens with imagery of scourged fields and deteriorated, dead trees in both the novel and the 2009 film adaptation. The similarity of this scene with the reality of a deforestation zone is striking and suggests this is an intentional reproduction. A vital scene appears as two trees fall in succession, ‘there was a sharp crack from somewhere… then another’[29]. These trees serve as a contemporary analogy symbolic for the twin towers as they collapse. Similarly to Ground Zero, all landscapes within the novel have been covered by ‘dust and ash everywhere’[30] in place of life. When they return to the man’s childhood home there are ‘the bones of a small animal dismembered and placed in a pile. Possibly a cat.’[31]. The nameless remains echo 9/11 in the impossibility of claiming identity via the destruction enacted upon the body. The man’s claim that ‘all the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later’[32] sounds prophetic in relation to this. Is McCarthy referencing mass deforestation, as ‘the planet has already lost eighty percent of its forest cover to deforestation’[33], or is he hinting at increased nuclear terrorism occurring, felling buildings like trees?

McCarthy further hints at placing the blame for his dystopian territory upon the twenty-first century via his descriptions of the ‘alien sea’[34]. The sea has transformed, through spoliation into the Other and is thus beyond recognition. In our reality, 93% of the Great Barrier Reef has been bleached white partially due to ‘global warming caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions’[35]. The sea in our own time has thus adopted an alien-like appearance akin to McCarthy’s text. Thomas Hawkins’ painting of ‘The Great Sea-Dragons as They Lived’ in 1840 is of particular interest in comparison to The Road:

Figure 3: The Great Sea Monsters Book (Cover) – Thomas Hawkins[36]

The man speculates upon ‘great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in cold darkness’[37], while Dave Egger’s The Circle mirrors the sentiment of what is hidden in the ‘darkness’:

‘They were hidden in the dark water, in their black parallel world, and knowing they were there, but not knowing where, or really anything else, felt, at that moment, strangely right.[38]

This quotation lies parallel to McCarthy’s, wherein the man retains hope for what lies beneath the surface, namely for ‘life in the deep’[39]. Egger’s and McCarthy’s quotes lie in continuance with the image depicted by Hawkins, of ‘Great Monsters’ lurking beneath the sea surface, behemoths carrying the eternal ‘fire’[40] of life. His hope is spurred by his desperate nostalgia and his desire to give his son a somewhat palatable life.

In the further juxtaposition of Eggers’ The Circle with McCarthy’s The Road, it is important to compare the linear nature of a ‘road’ with a ‘circle’ to Dante’s Inferno. Egger’s novel The Circle examines anti-utopian life through the notion of a disguised dystopia. The scenery is utopian, ‘wild with pacific colour’[41] in contrast with ‘dark beyond darkness’[42]. McCarthy’s world is consumed by ‘grey light’[43] while the landscape is the circle is ‘spotless and blue’[44]. These colour representations are that of heaven vs. hell, yet the worlds bear striking similarities. We thus introduce Dante’s Inferno and the layout of his perceived ‘lower hell’:

Figure 4: Dante’s illustration of Lower Hell in Inferno

Within both The Circle and The Road, it is completing ‘the circle/the road’ that leads to depravity. In The Circle, increased surveillance leads to ‘a world of perpetual light’[45]. This represents knowledge and illumination of secrecy, whereas our protagonists in The Road aim for the literal meaning of light, breaking past the Beckettian darkness of their surroundings. Foucault’s theory of the panoptical prison[46] is relevant as fear of being ‘watched’ conditions our characters. The completion of the inner circle is delving further into hell, whereas the dashed line can be compared to a ‘road’, also leading to apocalyptic doom. This extends the notion of ‘what lies below’ in metaphysical and mental terms, through ‘the man’s’ death and Mae’s totalitarian dictatorship.

Following Dante’s model, within The Road, our characters witness those ‘violent against their neighbours’ through the phalanx. Those ‘violent against self’ is experienced through the mother’s suicide to escape this damned life. Before descending further toward Geryon[47] and ‘The Great Barrier’, we enter the area reserved for those ‘violent against God, man, and nature’. Enter the scene in which the father and son discover the cannibal’s stores:

‘Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous. Jesus, he whispered’[48].

This passage successfully integrates all three of these aspects. The father takes Jesus’ name in vain whilst the cannibals defy human nature to consume their fellows. This represents both a moral and a physical descent as the father passes down ‘[49]rough wooden steps’ to reach these wretched souls. Through such depravity, the dystopian thought is inevitable, and no one is safe from despair. The repeated connotation of ‘blackened’ recalls the aforementioned baby, and hints further at the issue of Black Lives Matter that has set a ‘mood’ for our generation.

The pessimism infiltrating The Road is not dissimilar from the twenty-first-century mentality. The wife’s lamentation that ‘they are going to rape us and kill us and eat us’[50] is not foreign in our times. Women walk alone at night similar to our protagonists in the fear of being watched hence a large resurgence in feminist thought. The Black Lives Matter movement is necessary due to the number of innocent people who are being killed by police brutality. While we have not reached the stage where they physically ‘eat us’, the mental panic gnaws at our brains. The world stands as a conglomerate of uncertainties and fears, especially for generation X, as a result. It is estimated that ‘350 million people of all ages’[51] suffer from depression and that ’10 times more people suffer from major depression now than in 1945’[52]. While reasons for this are varied, the reality is impossible to avoid – we are experiencing a ‘mental’ apocalypse. The man struggles with his reality, especially as their bullet supply depletes. At the start of the novel, he questions himself: ‘Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?[53]. This is a question of life or death – in a perilous scenario, is he going to be capable of murdering his son as an act of mercy? Moreover, what matter is the concept of time when death is inevitable? As Berger states, ‘apocalypse is our history; what difference does a change in the calendar make?’[54]. After all, they will die ‘sometime’, even if it is ‘not now’[55]. Death is not apocalyptic but realistic.

To conclude, I reference a quote by Orwell:

“All of the things you’ve at the back of your mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries… It’s all going to happen.’[56]

Orwell’s quote covers the content of this essay in a prophetic manner. Apocalyptic thought is increasing and the introduction of post 9/11 novels have only set the mood further. The ever-approaching threat of terrorism is not inherent within the human condition, but a primary concern of our century. ‘Abandon all reason, avoid all eye contact, do not react’[57] croons Thom Yorke. Foucault’s panopticon is still enacted today as we shadow our protagonists of The Road, avoiding the gaze of those around us to preserve our own discourses. However, it is impossible to not ‘react’, subjecting to the authority of those who govern our bodies and our planet. This is what gives McCarthy’s text such poignancy. He purposefully keeps the limitations of his landscape vague and we are left pondering the purgatorial event. Has devastation been caused by man, or nature, a nuclear winter or the eruption of Yellowstone Super Volcano?[58] ‘A long shear of light and a series of low concussions’[59] are reminiscent of a nuclear bomb compared to the inescapable ash across the land, evoking volcanic eruption. The blame is vague, but the message is clear: ‘sometime’ is not far off.

[1] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.197

[2] Ibid, p.190

[3]Jakob Nilsson, Sven-Olov, Foucault, Biopolitics and Governmentality (United States: Södertörn, 2013). p.73

[4] Thanatopolitics is a philosophical term that discusses the politics organizing who should live and who should die (and how) in a given form of society.

[5] Michel Foucault and Robert Hurley, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1 (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1990). p.137

[6] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.96.

[7] Ibid, p.96

[8]Mika Ojakangas, ‘Michel Foucault and the Enigmatic Origins of Bio-Politics and Governmentality’, History of the Human Sciences, 25 (2012), 1–14 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0952695111426654>. p.4

[9] Michel Foucault and others, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) p.252.

[10] The first war in recorded history took place in Mesopotamia in 2700 BCE between Sumer and Elam.

[11] Fred Dallmayr, Against Apocalypse: Recovering Humanity’s Wholeness (United States: Lexington Books, 2015). p.1.

[12] The countries that have conducted thermonuclear weapon tests at present are the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, the People’s Republic of China and India. North Korea claimed in January 2016 they had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb yet this has been disputed.

[13] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.213

[14] Ibid, p.29

[15] Ibid, p.9

[16] Ibid, p.108

[17] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.68

[18] Ibid, p.66

[19] Ibid, p.77

[20] Ibid, p.11

[21] Ibid, p.27

[22] Ibid, p.86

[23] D.H Lawrence, Apocalypse, ed. by Mara Kalnins, Cambridge (Reading: Granada Publishing). p.13

[24] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.94

[25] Ibid, p.33

[26] Ibid, p.65

[27] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.19

[28] John Hillcoat, The Road (USA, 2009).

[29] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.35

[30] Ibid, p.5

[31] Ibid, p.26

[32] Ibid, p.35

[33] Anonymous, ‘Deforestation Statistics’ (The World Preservation Foundation, 2009) <http://www.worldpreservationfoundation.org/blog/news/deforestation-statistics/#.VyoN8aODGko> [accessed 3 May 2016].

[34] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.230

[35] Michael Slezak, ‘Great Barrier Reef: 93% of Reefs Hit by Coral Bleaching’, The Guardian (The Guardian, 5 May 2016) <http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/19/great-barrier-reef-93-of-reefs-hit-by-coral-bleaching> [accessed 3 May 2016].

[36] John Martin, John Martin: Apocalypse, ed. by Martin Myrone (New York: Distributed in the U.S. by Abrams, 2011). P.50

[37] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.234

[38] Dave Eggers, The Circle: A Novel (United Kingdom: Hamish Hamilton, 2014). P.83

[39] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.234

[40] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009)

[41] Dave Eggers, The Circle: A Novel (United Kingdom: Hamish Hamilton, 2014). p.1

[42] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.1

[43] Ibid, p.2

[44] Dave Eggers, The Circle: A Novel (United Kingdom: Hamish Hamilton, 2014). p.1

[45] Dave Eggers, The Circle: A Novel (United Kingdom: Hamish Hamilton, 2014). p.491

[46] Discipline and punish

[47]Geryon is the Monster of Fraud. He is a winged beast with ‘the face of an honest man, the paws of a lion, the body of a wyvern, and a poisonous sting at the tip of his tail’. He lives between the Seventh and Eighth circles of Hell within Dante’s Inferno.

[48]Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.116

[49] Ibid, p.116

[50] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.58

[51] WHO, ‘Depression’, World Health Organization (World Health Organization, 2016) <http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs369/en/> [accessed 1 May 2016].

[52] Mark Tyrrell, ‘Major Depression Facts’ (Clinical Depression.co.uk, 2014) <http://www.clinical-depression.co.uk/dlp/depression-information/major-depression-facts/> [accessed 29 April 2016].

[53] [53] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.28

[54] James Berger, ‘Introduction’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 46 (2000), 387–95 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-2000-1006>. p.388

[55] [55] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.58

[56] George Orwell, Coming up for Air, ed. by 1st World Library (Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library - Literary Society, 2004). P.274

[57] Radiohead, Burn the Witch, Burn the Witch, 2016.

[58] BBC, ‘Science & Nature - Supervolcano’, BBC, 2005 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/supervolcano/article.shtml> [accessed 5 May 2016].

[59]Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Pan MacMillan, 2009) p.54

0 notes