Throughout this semester, I have also been taking Professor Melanie Blood’s “Brecht & Descendants” course which focuses on the socialist playwright Bertolt Brecht. As expected from a socialist, a lot of his works focus on class differences in socio-economical terms. Due to the overpowering influences of society created by these different statuses, the characters’ identities are often muted, especially in the 1900s. Different classes have different rights taken away and/or determined for them. On one hand, the daughters of the bourgeois might have no say in who they can marry depending on their parents’ wants. On the other hand, the working class have limited working opportunities and specific living areas based on the government. Keeping this in mind, a similar situation can be found in the world of voluntourism. Continue reading “Supply and Demand”
Consent from humans beings
Now that we’ve read through Zone One by Colson Whitehead, I found myself comparing and contrasting the lives of the zombies to the lives of slaves from Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington. There were differences in the lifestyles that people lived by before they turned into zombies and the slaves before they were used for medical research. What I found to be most interesting, were the similarities in that all the people who turned into zombies or were used for medical and scientific research after their death weren’t given the opportunity to give consent for others to exploit their bodies after they died. Regardless of how they lived before they died, their natural and moral privilege as humans to have consent over their bodies before and after death was confiscated.
Whitehead indicates that zombies are considered to be characters that go through negative experiences. Zombies inadvertently increased their population by infecting humans with their infection which causes the others to also have the urge to infect others. The lifestyles that most of the people lived by before they were infected were generally good alongside the lives that all African slaves lived since the 1800s. “The dead had paid their mortgages on time”… “The dead had graduated with admirable GPAs, configured monthly contributions to worthy causes, judiciously apportioned their 401 (k)s across diverse sectors according to the wisdom of their dead licensed financial advisers, and superimposed the borders for the good school districts on mental maps of their neighborhoods which were often included on the long list when magazines ranked cities with the Best Quality of Life.” (31)
Washington reveals a similar fact in that slave’s experienced negative treatment, which in particular situations were painful mentally, physically and/or visually. When African slaves were brought to the United States they were enslaved to work out in the fields down south in the blistering heat; they were treated unjustly. Eventually, “President Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, which granted freedom to slaves in Confederate states,” in 1863. This allowed these people to be “free” in being able to work by their own means, marry legally, receive education, own their own homes, etc., but they still lived under “the white man’s legal system.” Their rights were still under surveillance because of the aggression of white folk who hated blacks. African American culture was configured by the slave mentality. Even after they were “freed” they were viewed as garbage.
These human beings experienced being enslaved to a modern slave mentality and to societal stereotypes. They still had to fight for rights, weren’t paid enough, were beat up, spit on and treated in various inequitable ways. African American rights were so neglected that as slaves or even after they were “freed,” they weren’t allowed to have medical attention if they were ill or injured in any form. “Enslaved African Americans were more vulnerable than whites to respiratory infections, thanks to poorly constructed slave shacks that admitted winter cold and summer heat.”(29) that simply proves to show the levels of morality that the masters had for their slaves. Another example of that happening is when a slave owner William Massie says “““Patty” had just dies “of I known not what disease… She has been saying she was sick for near a year and always tended to be sick.” No doctor was ever summoned to investigate…””
I found that the neglect only gets worse when scientific researchers used their bodies after their death for research that was helpful in finding cures to diseases, learning more about the human body, acknowledging the differences between different human beings, understanding genetics and the list goes on. An example where this is taken place is when Dr. Lunsford Yandell, a white research scientist states: “On March 16th, 1833, I was called before sunrise to visit a Negro woman. I took from her twelve ounces of blood… I waited about fifteen minute when she had a severe convulsion.” (29) that woman had no power over her own body. It was already enough that she had no control over the system during the time period but to have no control over your physical body is torturous.
The problem is that they didn’t consent to give their bodies up for research. In today’s day and age, consent is mandatory for every action doctors or scientists partake in doing to you when you’re alive and when you are dead. It’s only morally right because people have different beliefs and religious perspectives about the afterlife and care about what happens to their bodies after they die. Compared to Zone One, zombies had their lives taken away just as slaves did from the moment they were born in to the system where if you had any percentage of black in you, you were a slave.
Both zombies and slaves had their lives changed drastically and dealt with negative experiences.
Consent establishes your choice of whether you accept what one person or a group can do to you entirely. If consent were considered by the research scientists, the information in scientific and history textbooks would be switched around. If consent were considered by the zombies who infected other humans, Zone One would be a complete different story.
Straggler to Skel
In this post I want to discuss a specific incident in Zone One and try to understand what this scene could mean. The scene I’m looking at is the fortune teller scene, here’s a quick recap: While on their duty of sweeping Zone One, Gary, Kaitlyn, and Mark Spitz come across a fortune teller rotting in her shop. When they first see the fortune teller she appears to be a Straggler and per usual, Gary feels the need to make a joke out of it by staging a seance. During Gary’s clerical stunt, Mark Spitz notices that the Straggler appears to be smiling, and as Gary releases the fortune teller’s hand from his she bites down on his thumb. This scene surprises the characters because the fortune teller had shown signs of being a Straggler.
Up until that scene there was a clear distinction between the Stragglers and the Skels, being that one group moved and attacked the living, and the others just stood frozen and inactive. “The fortune-teller must be a mistake, an errant bad comet loping into their solar system, the malfunctioning one percent of the malfunctioning one percent.” (Whitehead 301), but what if it wasn’t just a mistake, what if it was the parasite transforming and perhaps becoming stronger? In previous scenes in the novel, if a Skel saw a human they would immediately attack them or would at least wander around until they could smell flesh. But in this scene the Skel appears to pretend to be dormant until she finds the right opportunity to make her move. So could this mean the parasite is adapting to its environment and learning to survive more efficiently? Unfortunately the novel ends before this can be explored.
If the parasite were to adapt I believe it would mean an end to civilization. At the end of the book, the outcome for Zone One already looks pretty grim, the dead are gathering in masses around Zone One, “It was the most mammoth convocation of their kind Mark Spitz had ever had the misfortune to see. The things were shoulder to shoulder across the entire width of the avenue, squeezed up against the buildings, an abhorrent parade that writhed and palsied up Broadway until the light failed.” (303) So the situation is already pretty bad, but if the Skels learned a way to mimic Stragglers I think it’d be enough for them to overcome humanity. And that would be the end of us all.
Unintentional Ignorance
On September 30th I attended a lecture given by author and climate activist Bill McKibben. In his lecture, he was informative and passionate about what he stood for and what he is trying to accomplish in his goal. One project he founded was the 350 mission. 350 uses online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions to oppose new coal, oil and gas projects, take money out of the companies that are heating up the planet, and build 100% clean energy solutions that work for all. 350’s network extends to 188 countries. This mission stood out to me because in today’s society it is difficult to bring different countries together in efforts to reach one goal. Bill McKibben also discussed that climate change is dangerous to our health. Breathing in the toxins in the air can lead to serious health issues later on in life. This correlates to our in-class discussion of medicine and how so many people are unaware of the possible health issues caused by climate change. I personally was unaware of how dangerous climate change can truly be on one’s health.
This bring up the discussion of unintentional ignorance. Unintentional ignorance can relate to the topic of medical volunteerism. Medical volunteerism can be explained as health-care providers volunteer annually for short-term medical service trips. However, these “health-care providers” aren’t actually health care providers at all. They tend to be uncertified undergrad students that lack basic medical training. These students cause more harm than good due to their unintentional ignorance of believing that they are helping these communities. These students believe that it looks beneficial on their resume and will increase their chances of getting a job in the future. But the matter of fact is that these students never stick around long enough to face the outcome of these communities. Unintentional ignorance can create detrimental issues if not addressed.
Is Helping People Harmful?
In class, we’ve discussed medical voluntourism and how it effects others in foreign countries. Usually when people hear about such programs, they assume that traveling abroad and providing medical assistance/supplies to areas that lack resources is a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to see people willing to take time out of their schedule and go somewhere to help build up a community. However, they might do so in a manner where they come across as being insensitive. In group discussions, it seemed to me that we were only dissecting and critiquing the cons of medical voluntourism. This led me to question, if medical voluntourism is such a controversial and socially detrimental situation, why are there still service trips that travel abroad? There has to be some sort of silver lining to this, right? I did some research to try and find organizations that follow the philanthropist ideal and to hopefully restore my faith in humanity. Continue reading “Is Helping People Harmful?”
Thinking Out Loud: Questions for Clay’s Ark and Genetics
While reading Octavia Butler’s “Clay’s Ark,” I couldn’t help but think of how Butler hints at some type of genetic engineering in her text. My mind was constantly going back in forth between Keira’s cancer, acute myeloblastic leukemia (460), and the epidemic that Eli brought down to Earth (480). It appears that this epidemic heightens the senses of humans and allows the human body to mend itself from most damage it comes across. Keira’s cancer has the opposite effect. Her body is slowly deteriorating and there has been no luck in curing Continue reading “Thinking Out Loud: Questions for Clay’s Ark and Genetics”
Going on a Service Trip? What to Expect
In January, I will be traveling to Houston with Livingston Cares to assist with flood recovery. To prepare me for this trip, I attended a GOLD workshop, Going on a Service Trip? What to Expect last week. Continue reading “Going on a Service Trip? What to Expect”
Do We Resist The Order
Because the class itself has not touched upon the medical topic in a while, I was interested to read the article. I personally am not very familiar with the “Do Not Resuscitate” order, so I had to do a little bit of research before commenting on this subject. Continue reading “Do We Resist The Order”
Losing Your Identity
While discussing Colson Whitehead’s use of teeth in Zone One, Emma and I began to reflect on the significance of teeth historically. During the Holocaust, people were viewed as objects, so the qualities that defined them as unique individuals were stripped of them. Nazis separated families from each other, cut off the hair of women, burnt people, placed Jews in gas chambers, and even forcefully removed teeth of individuals with gold fillings. Continue reading “Losing Your Identity”
Excused Profanity
[I should have posted this a lot earlier when we were reading Zone One but I kept pushing it off until now. I thought this might help others with their finals papers so I’m uploading it now.]
As someone who is not very interested in the zombie genre, I didn’t exactly look forward to this book; not to say that I didn’t want to read it but I didn’t feel any particular excitement to pick it up. Continue reading “Excused Profanity”