in korea, i started to panic a bit cos i realised that there's still a lot of homework and not so much time left to do it, so this morning i tried to do a bit. being a natural-born slacker, obviously i failed. all i managed to do was finish the AC circuit tutorial, which took me a few hours. i had time, in fact i was going to start on the rest of physics, then i got distracted... and wasted the rest of the day away. got carried away surfing the interwebs, which explains the latter part of this post, which...
...is the reason for the title of this post. it's actually a quote from 1984 by george orwell, a book i've been re-reading these few days. the protagonist argues with the "bad guy" that some day, the human spirit will awaken and overthrow the Party, but he rebutts by saying that the protagonist is effectively the last surviving person who could still possibly defy them. he then brings him in front of a mirror to show his tattered body, tortured for months, and declares "If you are human, then this is humanity. Now put your clothes back on." the statement that im trying to say here is that humanity is only as good as the humans that make up the population, and of course the future of the humans are the human children. i was randomly surfing the web when i came across this article about an 11-year-old mother. the mother is 11, the father is 19, and to add to the drama she even went into labour and delivered on her wedding day.
my first reaction was of course "eww". after all, you cant imagine anything pretty out of the phrase "11-year-old giving birth". i wouldnt even have thought it was physically possible for such a young body to already be reproductively capable.
then my thoughts went on to the future that this new mother would have, if it is even conceivable that she will have a future to speak of. from what little dialogue of the interview with this girl that was published, i cannot imagine her as a mother in any way. she says things like "I'm not going to play with toys anymore - I have a new toy now (the baby)". what kind of mother treats her baby like a toy? and doesnt the word "toy" imply that she moght get bored of her plaything and possibly discard or neglect it?
and this other statement, "It feels strange...now I must grow up. I am not going back to school." do you see the problem here? SHE'S NOT GOING BACK TO SCHOOL. she's not going to get any education higher than... whatever is the bulgarian equivalent of primary 5 education. she's not going to be able to land a job any better than menial worker. she does have have her mother and mother-in-law to take care of her, but they cant possibly provide for her and their granddaughter all the way into adulthood; what about retirement, what about death? the two grandmothers will sadly have to go some day, and when that happens i cannot bear to envision what will become of our young mother here.
and of course, all this is ignoring the psychological trauma to both mother and daughter, that their age gap is only 11 years. ironically, there were these 2 sisters in my korea tour group who are 7 years apart, so it's not hard to imagine adding another 4 years to that and suddenly calling your older sister "mom". which is wrong on so many levels i shall let your imagination run with it.
and finally, i thought about how this might be the first symptom of worse things to happen to humanity. in days long gone, pre-marital sex was considered taboo, but slowly it got accepted into society, and now any movie or TV show featuring a guy and girl is bound to have a sex scene somewhere along the lines. and then slowly we descended further to a point where 18-19 year olds have sex and people barely raise an eyebrow. sure, back in the day these were considered highly controversial sins, but now they're getting more and more frequent and people seem to be caring less and less. im sure if our forefathers saw the state we are in today they would surely vomit blood. parenthood at 11 - sure, now we might gag in disgust, but could it possibly be a precursor to what will soon be a common, even acceptable occurence? this girl, this generation, my generation, is decaying beyond recognition.
If we are human, then this, this horror, is humanity. I cannot decide if it is harder to admit that we have degenerated below the baseline of humanity, or if humanity itself has plunged below the horizon of civilisation, into the inky depths of bestiality.
