10th Grade - Back to the Future

10^th Grade blog – Back to the future

The most common theme I see between the different videos and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” is the creator asking questions about our fears, such as: how do our fears affect the way we construct and live in society? I think our fears play a large part in how we live our lives – on some level we are constantly avoiding our fears to make ourselves happy. So, people use their collective fears to construct society in one way or another. 

For example, “Harrison Bergeron” is a perfect example of society using their fears to construct a society in a certain way. The people in Harrison Bergeron’s society had a fear of competition between people, and having inequality in abilities. What they failed to understand, however, is that different people have different positive qualities – and that’s okay. They equalized everyone so no one was exceptionally good at anything. While this made everyone equal, it did not celebrate the different abilities people have. There is a line we must draw with equalizing; it is okay to let people be exceptional at certain fields, because other people are exceptional at other fields. However, inequality becomes a problem when only one or two abilities are celebrated, and other abilities are ignored. I went to a high school where the starting quarterback for the football team was just as cool as the kid who played water polo and had a knack for playing the game Magic. I am extremely grateful for my high school, because I had the privilege to grow up in a community where whatever you did was okay and cool; there wasn’t one or two abilities that were celebrated – each person’s ability was equal in its “coolness.”

The message I would want my students to understand here is that people develop fears and let them govern their lives. And I’m not just talking about being scared of spiders or zombies – but rather broader and more complicated fears like failing or not fitting in. The fear of inequality led Harrison Bergeron’s society into the ground; everyone was so equal there was no celebration of some of the things that make life beautiful – like the arts.

I would transition from Harrison Bergeron to the Dystopian Timeline by discussing this idea that our fears dictate our lives and in a broader sense, our society. I think one of the things that made The Hunger Games so successful, as the Dystopian Timeline discusses, is the fact that this heroine was able to come up from nothing in the worst society imaginable. Suzanne Collins was able to create a dystopian world that would make anyone cringe – I mean, it can’t get much worse than sacrificing kids to slaughter each other while the whole country watches. Then, out of this terrible government and society, comes Katniss, a strong-willed female that people can also relate to because her main goal is to save her family. She’s humble. So – the point here is that the societies in these novels create a world based off our worst fears – sacrifice, harm to children, lack of freedom, etc – and highlight a character that rises above it. I think instead of teaching the Dystopian Timeline I would teach an entire dystopian book, so the students could really analyze the character and see how their actions helped them conquer the fears of their society. 

I would use the zombie videos as further examples of fears dictating society. In a way, Night of the Living Dead highlights the fact that we cannot just ignore our fears and shoot them away. We need to recognize our fears in order to understand what we don’t want our life to entail, but then be able to put them aside enough to not allow the fears to dominate our decisions. The “Why Do We Love Zombies?” video falls perfectly into the subject I am discussing. The creator believes that zombies are reflective of technology, something we are afraid of but not necessarily aware we are afraid of. The same goes for fear of failure or fitting in – we might understand that these are real fears of ours, but it’s hard to see the fears manifest themselves in our everyday life. I would use this video to highlight this fact.

Honestly, I was pretty thrown off by the podcast as I usually am by at least one of the texts. But one of the things I thought of as I was listening to it was that it painted a picture of a kind of creepy and foreign place – Night Vale. Maybe Night Vale could represent one of those societies constructed around fear? I don’t know – it jumped around a lot. Maybe the fear that is manifested in this podcast is a fear of not understanding… knowledge is a very important component to 21^st century US society, and without it I think without our thirst for knowledge our society would kind of break down. The way the podcast jumped around in time and subject may be reflective of us not being able to have a firm grasp on every aspect of the world – there will always be mystery in the world we cannot understand. I think this thought would scare some people, and therefore construct society in a way that tries to eliminate any guesswork or mystery… sort of like 21^st century US society. We try to apply science to almost every situation, when in reality science does not apply everywhere.