Remembering Wrong...

"It's my job to creep you out," Professor Donnelly says.

Well done, sir. When talked about the concept of placing chips in human beings, and while it sounds like a completely science-fictional concept, it's being done to animals all the time, mainly pets, who if run away, can be easily tracked down. There's a man in Saudi Arabia who developed a chip that can be placed under the skin of human beings that not only tracks them, but also releases a deadly dose of cyanide into a person's blood stream if they are being disobedient or acting contrary to the laws of their government....

Now granted, this was about three years ago, and it didn't really come to fruition. But could you imagine? With The Hunger Games coming out and everything, there has been a huge revamp of interest in dystopian literature. Every time a new dystopian novel comes out, Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, all of these novels experience a new wave of interest. Chips under the skin has already become a thing of reality. Now its just a matter if they're going to deem their use on humans acceptable or not.

This class often makes me anxious about the way the world is nowadays. It makes me scared. When Ranger just brought up some developments in the Treyvon Martin case that were released last Monday, how in fact it WASN'T an unsolicited vigilante act, but rather a case of self defense, even though Treyvon didn't have a weapon on him, he was physically assaulting the man who shot him.

Now, regardless of whether or not that's true, it reminds me so much of Animal Farm, it's frightening. It was a thought I was willing to bring up in class if I wasn't concerned it would take forever to explain. Basically, what happened was that after the animals chased the farmer off the farm and reclaimed it as their own, they began to form a new chain of command. Near the top of this is a pig named Snowball, who was a leader for the animals in their new government of sorts. There was a great battle in which the farmer tried to recapture the farm with the help of his men and Snowball was shot during the battle trying to take down the farmer. He sustained grievous wounds but was rewarded for his bravery. Then in a mutinous revolt, another pig named Napoleon used dogs to chase Snowball off the farm, thus opening the position for a leader. As the animals began to question this, saying, "Oh, no, Snowball was not a traitor! He was a true patriot, he fought bravely in the Battle of Cowshed and was wounded!" Then the "Grima Wormtongue" pig whose name currently escapes me says, "Oh no, comrades, he wasn't wounded, that never happened at all. He was actually fighting FOR the farmer. You are recollecting incorrectly." Or something along those lines. And even though the animals were convinced they'd remembered it one way, they resolved to think that Snowball was a traitor.

Now suddenly, this topic of Treyvon Martin has disappeared. No one's talking about it anymore. Its as if we all resolved to draw a solid conclusion based on here-say. And that's scary to me. And while it might be good that I'm thinking about these things in a very critical way, I don't like how uneasy it makes me feel. When my kids ask me what it was like when I was growing up, I don't want to say that the only thing I remember is being worried about the future. I suppose there are two ways I could look at it. The first is that it was a great time to be young. The voice of the young people hadn't been louder since the 1960s, and we were always eager to see what happened tomorrow...or some nostalgic nonsense like that. I don't want to say that we worried about the government and how they were going to screw us next, or how we had to resort to riding horseback because gas prices got too high