Things Are Bad

The march was good. I cried, and I felt hope for the first time in months. There are a lot of people here. We are the majority. Bless the women marching in literal Antarctica. Afterward, I asked Puhg if we could get a fancy cocoa, so we took the green line west to a place that dunks a s'more donut in your cup. I called reps. I prepared for my shows that night and the following days.

I am shocked that so many awful things have happened in less than a week. The human rights, the health, all of it--need need need to be restored, but more than anything else, we must must must save our environment. That damage cannot be undone.

We tell each other it will be okay and then text the very same people "It will not be okay." We take turns now. I recognize I am going to lose a lot of things, and some of those I believe were too good to be true in the first place. So maybe we deserve it. But that doesn't mean I'm not scared.

When Obama won, a classmate of mine, sitting next to me in the computer lab wrote on Facebook "This is the end of America," and honestly he was right. Because Obama's win generated the hate that has made our current president possible. It is so sad. We are not as smart as we thought we were. We let our greed and our assumption someone else better than us was taking care of things end us.

I truly believe the billionaires know the planet is over and will rake in as much money as possible to begin the new world where their grandson's will be king of the remaining few. That's how insane I have become. Every angle I face I succumb to a conspiracy theory. I pray for a solution that hasn't crossed my mind any of these long dark nights.

Green Analysis of Looper (Spoilers)

First of all, I really enjoyed Looper. Everyone I knew who had seen it from students to my dad had given it a serious thumbs up, so I had high expectations, and those expectations were certainly met. The movie is intriguing, beautifully crafted, and digestible enough to make sense, but complex enough to make you work/feel kind of smarty.

I also really appreciated the theme of conscientious environmentalism that can be applied to the film. As 20 somethings in a broken world they inherited, the Loopers feel as though their youthful behavior--while destructive--is theirs to enact. Again, they never asked to be part of that society in the first place. Even when directly faced with the consequences of the future, even for themselves, they do not want to change their ways.

The film also shows the heart of the struggle with environmental progress via Bruce Willis's character as he simultaneously demands a better future but refuses to change his own desires. We are empathetic to his emotion because we see that he is hopeful for a genuinely good thing. At the same time, by the end of the film we see that perhaps Willis is not wrong in that what he wants is a good thing...but that doesn't mean that overall he is working toward the greater good. To me, the projected solution of the film in terms of breaking the harmful cycle is something like, "Look. We get that you are but a human lost in the wide world without any personal responsibility for things, but just take some, would you? And furthermore, recognize that maybe you see something you could sacrifice as unsacrificable, but have you ever considered that perhaps there is more good--dare we say--BETTER good to fill the hole in your preconceived idea of perfection?"

There's a lot more to say on this topic (IE the use of retro fashion portraying this selfishness is not new to any generation), but I also have a lot of homework and grading to do.