i am a high school student writing a paper on bradbury's book farenheight 451 and the subject that has come up is that it depicts a future with no one person actually caring about what goes on in thier time i mean mildred is adicted to sleeping pills and the wall television i mean if you look at it our society is becoming this ever day

It does make one wonder!

bigman:

Society has always been like this. Tell me one thing that has changed since the dawn of man? Nothing! Each of us comes along and are abhorred when we see things begin to slip. Yet, they've always been slipping. We try to make good. We try to do better. We try to make society better. There has always been people trying to make things better. And there have always been people falling apart, when their base notions become the norm of their life, and should there be enough them, eventually hurts any society.

What can't be blamed on Jerry Springer can be blamed on THE SIMPSONS.

When Pittsburgh flooded, my home was a basement. I lived with three others, all of them on the floors above me.

I was competing at a tattoo convention in Woodstock, New York when the rains came. My room mates lost nothing, I lost everything.

They didn't lift a finger to save my possessions. They where too busy playing a video game called "Ever Quest" to realize what was happening.

I live with different people now. I went to my old roommates bedroom and stole his mattress as a small act of revenge. I did a few other things to, but I'm not typing those out.

I live in an apartment on top of a tattoo parlor. There's so much positive energy with the ones I currently live with. I have bounded with these people, made them my non-biological family.

Yeah, there may be total wastes of space, calling themselves human beings, but there's a lot of good people out there. You just need to find them, and do whatever it takes to get the pill-popping, stare at a screen all day people out of your life.

Get them out of your life, if you don't, there will be consequences.

Bigman, Man has not evolved an inch from the smile that spawned him.

Oopsies! That should be: Man has not evolved an inch from the (slime) that spawned him...

I think man has socially evolved considerably. Disease is being fought by persons of good faith. Slavery is being overcome. Women's and minority's rights have broadened. Many seek to pursue ethics in business. Child abuse is seen as wrong, whereas, much of this was felt to be the business of the family alone. There is awareness of the role of technology in de-humanizing man (with individuals like RB working to improve the layout and planning of cities to contribute to improved quality of life). Many persons seek to create lives that have a positive force on others. I teach philosophy at two community colleges, and watch my HS daughter and her peers trying to do well in school, active in their churches, etc.

There has always been selfishness and violence and evil with us. They won't be going away any time soon. But there are lots of good people out there, who really want to improve thier lives and the persons whose lives they influence.

Ah, but man's very first invention is still the most-used, i.e, The Excuse.

BrainSparks, interesting Freudian typo.

There has been and always will be balance.
Things will always be getting simeltaneously better and worse. Yin and Yang.

I was listening to an old Jack Benny radio show and thought of the way life was simpler and better in the past and how things (such as writing and entertainment) have degenerated since then and said something to the effect of, "Things were so much better back then." and a friend gently reminded me, "Only in some ways - could rochester have gone up to any lunch counter he wanted to and eaten back then."
Nope but he could today.
We have both gone downhill since then and come a long way since then.
And that's the way it goes.

Currently teaching Shelley's Frankenstein (The Modern Prometheus), with today's class discussions I could not help but shake my head at how things, for all they change, stay the same. Victor confronts his moral dilemmas in a ego driven manner, no matter what the outcome. This back in the 1820's. We have so many instances of this in the news 24/7!

Are we not faced with the same human conditions, though technologically superior to 200 years ago, as those Shelley - at the age of 19 - posed in her monumental novel? I think on personal levels we can say that we have improved our opportunities (employment, education, medicine, travel, science of space, etc.), but what has it gained us as a populace of the planet?

Nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, cultural degradation, species extermination, and psychological consternation! To name a few "-ations!" !? (I sound like Charlie Gordon, though I have had no enzyme implanted in my brain, nor steroid-growth hormone injections either, for that matter!)

It is, as Green Town alludes, a situation of light and darkness. We may understand all of the genetic codes some day soon, but who will control it and what will it do to really change things for the better? Identical sheep or sheep with chicken legs!? The Island of Dr. Moreau may be our next disembarkment. Or is Huxley the way of the future?

Green Town's final sign off has a tone similar to the words the always reliable Walter Cronkite expressed as he bid us good night at 7pm on the CBS Evening News, "And that's the way it is!"

Somehow reading RB keeps that glimmer of hope burning and inspires each of us to take it upon ourselves to make a difference in the long run, "Recreate the world and make it better for your having been here."


[This message has been edited by fjpalumbo (edited 03-01-2005).]

I liked the answer Jesus Christ gave when he was asked what would it be like at the end of the world. His answer, paraphrased:

It will be the same as in the days of Noah: People eating, drinking, marrying, and mocking the goodness of God.