When you want to know how this could be, when you cry tears to make room in you to keep going, when you ask what we should tell the children I offer you my unconditional love, and a mantra. This is why we fight.
In trying to make sense like so many of you today, I looked into this moment for an opportunity–and I found one. Sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia are no longer the monster under the bed or hidden beneath napkins and polite conversation at dinner. These insidious beasts that have stalked our nation are now out in the open. This past year’s contentious election has shown us all who wants to stand with us, and who doesn’t. Maybe this isn’t a moment we can’t imagine. Tonight I saw mass protests of women and men and trans people and whites and blacks and Latino and disabled people and people that love all those people unified together with clear and common purpose. Maybe this is the moment we find our common purpose and rise to meet it.
This moment is not about Donald Trump or 2016 or the Republican Party. No, this moment is a long time coming, the moment when the immovable object of white supremacy comes face to face with the unstoppable force of the demographic shifts that will make American a minority-majority country. This moment isn’t the first battle but could very well the last stand of white supremacy against the truth of the multicultural coutry we already are.
Is: the present tense. Not was, the word of the past. Not will be, a magical future that is always the day after tomorrow and never the now. Is. Present . Right now. If you weren’t an ally before, it doesn’t matter. If you’ve been fighting and you’re tired and you want to give up, that was before. If you think it will be better in two four or eight years, so what? This is now. Focus on the present.
Why is more important that what or how. What justice looks like and how it arrives requires a multitude of views, a flock of answers, a riot of solutions, more ways up the mountain. But the why is steadfast, unchanged and still the goal even extending into the future. To form a more perfect union. That was why in the past and will be why in the future but most importantly is the why now. In a world that makes you feel like you are drowning this why is your life raft.
We feel new feelings. We have never in our lives felt more threatened, or been more ready to fight. We have spent these last years mobilizing activating, networking an connecting. You were the left hand. You were the right foot. Parts of the giant of the electorate have shaken themselves from slumber. We were woke separately by issues specific to important aspects of our identity. We are awake together now. We have been building the will and skill to organize, maybe in preparation for this very moment.
Fight: that is what comes next. Fight is what ancestors who lived and died in slavery did even with no end in sight. Fight is what women did who secured the vote and the right to choice. Fight is what we did when police shot our brothers and sisters in the streets. Fight is what they are doing tonight at Standing Rock.We don’t play, guess, plead or wish. We fight. We fight hard and clean and often and together and separate in big and small ways. We raise our fists and our signs and our voices and our children to fight.
When you want to know how this could be, when you cry tears to make room in you to keep going, when you ask what we should tell the children I offer you my unconditional love, and a mantra. This is why we fight.
image credit: Samuel Mitchell, from the Boston Trump protest march 11.9.16
Since the beginning of the century, American films have explored stories of the apocalypse as commentary on our own modern challenges. Stories of the horrors science can create when man tries to play God lurk beneath the most popular zombie shows and in the cool futuristic sci-fi of super humans. These stories are equal parts inspiration and warning–a look over the cliff over science to the abyss of possibility that lies ahead of us. These stories, in turn, look into us, into our longing to be stronger, more powerful and to live forever.
In Apocalyptic America, we’ve been looking at the questions posed to us by the modern world that we live in–advances in science, new technologies and a host of problems caused by the postindustrial human condition–and the answers film gives us. Apocalyptic movies allow us to seen through a glass darkly at a world that awaits us as a consequence of our now. So it is with movies about humans tinkering with the laws of nature.
Some things that might get your sci-fi imagination going:
If you could use science to modify your body, would you? If so, how would you modify your body?
probably not this…
Would you diet or using science to make you super shapely or strong?
After having 10 cosmetic procedures in 1 day, Montag struggled emotionally, lost her show and is appearing this season on reality tv therapy show with her mother.
Would you choose the sex of your future baby? Or ensure their special skills?
Gender selection is banned in some countries, but not the US. Gender selection that occurred less scientifically as a result of China’s one-child-per-family rule is being blamed for a massive imbalance between males and females, having long-term consequences for marriage, births, and elder care
Would you modify your body to survive a disease or environmental crisis?
Before you say you would never alter your body, think instead about modification on a continuum from small changes like piercing your ears or wearing glasses all the way to the more extreme iterations like lizard man or gene therapy. As futuristic as some modification technology is, altering the body is nothing new. How acceptable these procedures are seems to connect to how much what they provide is “needed” according to cultural conventions and norms.
Medical Augmentations: Altering or adding to the body to compensate for disease or deformity is most acceptable with widespread support for advances.
Cosmetic modification: altering the body to improve appearance according to common beauty conventions is somewhat acceptable, especially if you meet the conventions conventionally. The more extreme the augmentation, the more unacceptable it becomes.
Genetic modification: Altering genes to change the structure of the body or object is controversial whether you are a tomato or a zygote. Genetically modified fruit–sometimes called Franken fruit–is blamed for a host of problems for humans and their environment, but also ubiquitous in our grocery stores. Modifying human embryos is illegal–today.
The gene-ie (ha! I got jokes in writing!) is already out of the bottle. Like our exploration into artificial intelligence and technology, the question is really no longer would we or wouldn’t we, but to what degree should we. Sadly, ethics around biological advances in science are far behind the technology.
Films approach a few of the ways that changes in human engineering could play out in our culture, affecting power, capital, and social relationships. Many movies prior to 2000 focused on the disastrous consequences of genes gone bad. Human-made monsters because of the lack of control of genetic processes.
As we move into the era of apocalyptic dread the stories shift a bit. As humans become more skilled at making changes to nature and potentially humans, we explore—and fear—the possibilities of what we might create. Here are some examples and the questions they ask
If we make humans, what rights do they have?
Human cloning hits new levels of skill—and for new reasons in this upbeat thriller. If we could make people, would we grant them the same inalienable rights we claim are for all? Note: we do have a hard time ensuring humans rights for all humans now a days. On the plus side, so far we have no structure for identifying babies born using genetic enhancements or fertility treatments.
How would capitalism manage the availability of advances in health tech?
Repo Men is the story of a world where people can buy organs to replace failing ones. Like a new car, if you don’t pay, the corporation sends someone to retrieve your organs. Healthcare costs are already a leading cause of bankruptcy. How much would a heart cost? Probably not less than Wheelock.
What would we do with Superhumans?
A host of movies like Lucy and Limitless and, of course, Xmen find ways to hack the human brain to open up our full potential. Oddly, the movie never ends with a world peace accord. Overwhelmingly advances in humans are coopted to earn capital or fight battles. How culturally hegemonic.
The ideas about what it means to be human and how easily we can lose all that we think we know is nothing new to your COM250 experience, Apocalyptic Americans–these are the common questions that underpin lots of Apocalyptic movies, and, truth be told, they underpin humanity’s grand story as well. The questions about how to navigate the boundaries of power, class and privilege in an era of evolved humanity are also the same questions about how to restructure society in the wake of wokeness that we have seen all semester. Just as we can’t imagine an end without us, robots without us, so we can’t imagine a new breed of super-humans without us either.
So what’s new in human engineering? Is there truth hiding inside these movies or is this boogie man solely in the mind of Hollywood?
Cosmetic Alteration
Paying a surgeon to give you the body of your dreams becomes more popular every year–the number of procedures is up in 2015. Cosmetic augmentation is common with more than 15 million cosmetic procedures performed last year. The most common procedures are botox, fillers, and chemical peels–all aimed to turn back the hand of time. Speaking of turning back, butt implants continue to be one of the fastest growing invasive procedures. Yeah, Kim!
Medical Augmentation
From 3d printing new limbs to growing new organs in a lab, medical science is moving ahead by leaps and bounds. Pop star Viktoria Modesta and her fantastic light up leg shows how transformative new technology can be in redefining ability. Advances in medical technology will increase your lifespan, but many ethical questions—including who can afford it—abound.
Genetic modification
Since the human genome was first mapped in 2003, our knowledge of the role genes play in making you you has expanded rapidly. If we can manipulate the genes of fruit to make the fruit we desire, might similar techniques be used to create the children we desire?
All of these futures before us are rife with the kind of possibilities that come with consequences we can only dream of. Far more serious than a few butt implants, the implications of all this tinkering are beyond even Hollywood’s wild mind. The challenges couldn’t be more real. Just a few months ago a US based organization, endorsed by over 150 experts int he field called for a moratorium on human genetic modification, warning that once we begin, the irreversible process can have implications beyond the boundary of any of these movies. Truth, it seems remains stranger than fiction.
I teach a course called Apocalyptic America where we explore film and TV about the end of the world and find out what they tell us about the challenges of our own world. The above is a makeup blog lecture (a blecture?) from a recent class. If you made it this far, you get an A for the day.
Need to be convinced that we’re obsessed with the end of the world? Or maybe you are obsessed with My little pony? Well if you can say yes to both, have i got an infographic for you!
Big big-ups to Andrew Kahn, Apocalyptic America student and IT jedi for this fantastic infographic he created tracking the millennial obsession with the apocalypse. Explore below or click to get a close up to find out how we’re going to end the world. Hint–better get that Cipro.
Have you ever noticed that you’re surrounded by zombies and invading aliens and survivalist? Stories about the end of the world are everywhere these days, from The Walking Dead to Elysium. Despite the fact that we can breathe a sign of relief with 2012 behind us, visions of the apocalypse still dance in our heads. So, to explore, I have been teaching a class at my college called Apocalyptic America, where we are trying to find out why our culture is so obsessed with the end. The answer is complicated and fascinating.
Stories of the end of the world are as old as the world itself, but if you think we have a particularly bad case of the apocalyptic blues, you’d be right. Rapid changes in society, advances in technology, and a changing geopolitical landscape gave us any number of avenues for our fears to run down. Aliens, Dawn of the Dead, and The Matrix showed us that the end was at hand by robots, or aliens or worst yet ourselves.
Even with Y2K a dud, the obsession with the end continued to snowball down the timeline from 2000, past 9/11 and straight towards 2012. Literally dozens of movies and television shows have played out the chess game of our imminent demise and the dark future that awaits us beyond the boundaries of our modern world.
This week, the class took a look at the 1983 made for TV film The Day After. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the hubbub around this film. Nearly 100 million people tuned in, and the film was followed by a televised debate on nuclear weapons, and accompanied by a toll-free hotline with counselors, school curriculum, and even a five episode series on conflict on Mr. Rogers to help children cope.
I had debated including the film. With so many films to look at, The Day After seemed a bit dated, the Cold War seems a distant memory to my students. Though conflict, obviously, has been an all too present headline throughout college students’ lives, the threat of wholesale nuclear annihilation seemed to belong to another generation.
But this past weeks events in Crimea and Ukraine made this 20-year-old movie seem as relevant as ever. At last week’s CPAC conference, keynote speaker Sarah Palin leveled criticism at Obama for choosing diplomacy over force in her usually eloquent and well thought out way.
Sadly for Momma Bear, and all of us, she is woefully wrong. As terrifyingly demonstrated in The Day After, nuclear war leaves no winners, only casualties. Stopping Putin with nukes in Crimea is a recipe for MAD–mutually assured destruction. But even with all we know about the consequences of nuclear war, I was surprised to see news headlines this morning heralding a return of the nuclear age.
The number of nuclear weapons stockpiled by countries, armed and ready has declined through consistent and concerted efforts of antiwar activists. However, the amount of plutonium available through commercial production opens and avenue for rogues to obtain material for bomb making easier than ever before.
The tension in Crimea reminds us that we still have work to do to make our world a stable safe place to live and grow in. We can’t ride in Grizzly-style and fight nukes with nukes, and we can’t think that nuclear war is a threat of the past. Instead of encouraging brute strength, use your political power to vote, advocate and petition to stop nuclear proliferation.
Ronald Reagan watched The Day After, and he wrote in his diary that it changed his idea of a winnable nuclear war. He said , “we have to do all that we can to be sure that there is never a nuclear war. ” Shortly thereafter, Reagan helped to end the Cold War. So do me a favor: send Sarah Palin a copy of The Day After, and let’s not fight nukes with nukes.
Susan X Jane 