All posts by ral10

Reflection

A Pre-Med’s Reflection on “The Cure”

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Ginu Kamani’s short story “The Cure” is anything but an easy read. It forces the reader to delve into gravely serious topics that are just soul-wrenching to any human with a conscience. In the story, a young girl is afflicted by a rapid growth disorder. Her mother, worrying that she will fail as a parent if her daughter is not married, becomes obsessed with finding some sort of treatment for her. In desperation, she hires a man who claims to be a doctor; a “sexologist.” This man’s treatment is to essentially rape the girl.

This story is infuriating on so many levels because it includes some of the worst aspects of humanity within it: pedophilia, rape, forced marriages, child marriages, health fraud, lack of freedom, ignorance, and a skewed mentality of what it means to be a mother. I doubt a single person can read this story and not feel some sort of rage or disgust towards the antagonists.

As a pre-med student, I aspire to be a doctor one day and help people who need it the most. Just the thought of people abusing the medical profession (which I know does happen) and disgracing the mere word “doctor” enrages me beyond belief. However, an important thing to realize is that frauds like that only exist because people believe in them.

Throughout this poem, Kamani makes it very evident that the main theme is about control and what each person can or can’t control in their lives. We can see this through the uncontrollable growth and general lack of ability to make decisions of the main protagonist. However, we can also read between the lines and see this main theme with the “doctor” itself. That man is only able to exert control over his patients because his patients believe that what he is doing is actually medicine, and his patients believe him probably because of a lack of basic education (or common knowledge for that matter since Ramdass, who is uneducated, knew what was actually happening). In other words, the patients’ ignorance presents itself as a form of lack of control. Being ignorant allowed them to be manipulated and abused, essentially giving over their ability to control what is done to them to “Dr. Doctor.”

The main point that Kamani wanted to drive through with her novel is to never let other people gain complete control over you. If you read between the lines like I did, you will know that a way to do that is to end one’s own ignorance; to find empowerment and more control over life through education.

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Semi-Coherent Sentences of In-Class Cut-up

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1. After more than 50 years and strength to legitimize atte[ndance] and began to tap on disorder, Keith Connors.
2. Severely hyperactive and thousands of men, once shunned, angry-looking bird with a recognized as having a have taken part in problem.
3. Doctors against the pressure of accepted drugs like Addeen turning the parta to temper in the parcel on the desk; helping youngsters succeed who will throw a beyond.
4. A traffic light gonged; disorder had soared to 3 democracy’s big 100,000 in 1990.
5. Medication often assuaged, but our will is great; impulsiveness and I in his mouth, dropped, allowing a person’s under-intelligence to emerge.

There were a few more that might pass off as understandable, but these were by far the best ones.

Have fun with them!
Ricky Lozoya

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Gojira and Peaceful Japan: How People Worried and Learned to Hate the Bomb

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Unlike its sequels (American and Japanese), the very first Godzilla (Gojira in Japan) film was, not only about the fantastically epic monster-man battle, but also centered around the morality of using weapons of mass destruction. Truthfully, using an ancient dinosaur-dragon beast is a particularly strange way of highlighting such a serious topic, but if anyone has the right to talk about the human cost of WMD’s, it’s Japan. At the time this film was released, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had only just been bombed nearly a decade prior and reconstruction (emotional, psychological, and physical) were still taking place. So it makes sense that several of the scenes within the film seem to mirror what Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked like after being obliterated and many pieces of dialogue amongst the characters reflected the opinions of several scientists working on the Manhattan Project.

In the film, Gojira destroys a large portion of Tokyo, leaving smoldering remains and orphaned children that seem eerily reminiscent of the results of a nuclear explosion. In addition, the movie played around with the idea that in order to deal with an unstoppable, destructive force like Gojira (who is an embodiment of a nuclear weapon) another unstoppable, destructive force needed to be deployed. This mirrors the arms race on a small scale; the fear that no one entity can or should control such a destructive force and the only solution is to arm at least one other entity with an equally powerful destructive force. In the case of the movie, it was a WMD that sucked the oxygen out of water and destroyed all organic matter. The creator did not want to use it as a weapon, for fear that it would spark an even more intense arms race from that which was already going on between the USSR and the U.S. He was so afraid that many innocent people would be killed if his invention were to be used for some geopolitical goal that he chose to destroy his life’s work and die rather than leave a single trace of his weapon.

So what’s the message? Nuclear weapons are bad? That was already an established fact (especially to Japan), so why make a film highlighting it? I believe the Ishiro Honda, the director, wanted us to instead focus on the human reaction to a devastating attack. When a WMD

Reflection

The Changed View of War: Reflection on “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “The Dead”

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Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” highlights a moment during the Crimean War where 600 British soldiers mistakenly charged heavily fortified Russian artillery forces after receiving incorrect orders. Subsequently, most of them died without having gained much during the attack. Rather than describing the pointless loss of life during that charge, Tennyson chooses to glorify the soldiers’ choice to courageously follow through with the orders without hesitation over its feasibility. Nowadays, we might refer to this as “blind obedience”, and would rarely declare it an act of valor. Instead, most of us would feel contempt towards the leader giving orders and pity for the soldiers who followed them. In the 19th century, the battlefield was considered just as much a place for nations to show off their “muscle” and military wit as it was to settle diplomatic disputes. Sixty years later, this mentality led to several European powers being eager to find an excuse to wage war with one another. When that excuse finally arrived and the First World War began, the mentality dramatically shifted as tens of thousands of people were dying every day without a clear reason as to why. War no longer seemed distant as the possibility of knowing someone who died in battle severely increased with each passing year. War became personal. Rupert Brooke describes it best in his poem “The Dead”. Brooke individualizes the perished troops and gives them a “story” to their lives. The poem consists of descriptions of very human experiences such as love and watching sunsets. He makes it very clear that all those who died in battle were not born soldiers. They shared the same experiences we have every day and would most likely continue those experiences for several more years had they not died in battle. Brooke highlights that any loss of life is cruel as it terminates the human experiences we all partake in. If anything, Brooke is trying to glorify the men who died based on how they lived rather than what they were doing when they died.