When I began reading to find “my story” I found it very hard, many if not all of the stories deal with some of the most extremes of humanity thought of. Gruesome stories, the likes of which I have never experienced anything close to. I’ve never been cooked into a stew because I resemble my father, I’ve never been beaten over the head because I’m a skilled weaver. I had never had almost any of these things happen to me, I knew to interpret these as metaphors for life and I did my best with that, still though I could never quite place one story as MY story. After several frustrated nights I simply decided to go back to the beginning and start from there, where I came upon not only my story, but our story. Society as I see it, the world I feel we have come to.
While reading THE FOUR AGES I was awestruck at how closely it resembled our own societies history and present, the first I felt represented the native American way of life, no law was needed, no penalties hung over the heads of man scaring people into a way of life. Now, there are some differences many of the tribes did in fact need warriors and such other things but general idea is still present, as the ages went on Man manifested into creatures of want, we soon gave value to objects of no use, things like gold which is only an artifact of desire, greed and jealousy came about and the murder of men and the rape of woman became common place. None of these things had previously existed until material objects appeared, man’s progress became and is becoming the man’s demise. There was even a movie made in the late 80’s dealing with this idea, “The God’s Must Be Crazy” dealt with a tribe in Africa, who had never experienced greed or violence until the God cast down from the heavens a class Coke bottle. I feel as though that this is OUR story as society where once we lived in harmonies peace, we now have become a breed of creature hell bent of “life improvement” we create machines to make life easier, we create weapons to make us safer but in the recent years we’ve brought to the table microwaves that give us brain tumors, GMO food that is unknowing poisoning us (ironically brought to us by the same company that made DDT-yeah that was safe) and nuclear weapons which divide nations with fear of their use, and if used will undoubtedly kill us all-this, this is our progress on safety.
In the story of Icaurs we see the future of our progress, the wings which men build out of hope and aspiration will soon fail us and send our son’s to die, this is our story, the progress of man proceeds only to man’s demise.
While reading THE FOUR AGES I was awestruck at how closely it resembled our own societies history and present, the first I felt represented the native American way of life, no law was needed, no penalties hung over the heads of man scaring people into a way of life. Now, there are some differences many of the tribes did in fact need warriors and such other things but general idea is still present, as the ages went on Man manifested into creatures of want, we soon gave value to objects of no use, things like gold which is only an artifact of desire, greed and jealousy came about and the murder of men and the rape of woman became common place. None of these things had previously existed until material objects appeared, man’s progress became and is becoming the man’s demise. There was even a movie made in the late 80’s dealing with this idea, “The God’s Must Be Crazy” dealt with a tribe in Africa, who had never experienced greed or violence until the God cast down from the heavens a class Coke bottle. I feel as though that this is OUR story as society where once we lived in harmonies peace, we now have become a breed of creature hell bent of “life improvement” we create machines to make life easier, we create weapons to make us safer but in the recent years we’ve brought to the table microwaves that give us brain tumors, GMO food that is unknowing poisoning us (ironically brought to us by the same company that made DDT-yeah that was safe) and nuclear weapons which divide nations with fear of their use, and if used will undoubtedly kill us all-this, this is our progress on safety.
In the story of Icaurs we see the future of our progress, the wings which men build out of hope and aspiration will soon fail us and send our son’s to die, this is our story, the progress of man proceeds only to man’s demise.
-Now piety lies vanquished; and the maid Astaea, last of the immortals
leaves the blood-soaked earth.-
–welcome to the machine-
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