A blog out of the blue. I just chanced on the linked video, and thought you – all of us – really ought to take a thoughtful look at it.
This is like a door in a horror movie that an innocent passer-by inadvertently opens onto a charnel house. Except this door opens onto the real world. Our real world. The real world that sustains us. The horror is reality.
Do you recall the 1972 movie “Soylent Green”? It was set in a future in which the human population has far outstripped natural resources, humanity is crammed into megacities, farms are under armed guard, the living wonders of nature only exist on celluloid, played to pacify the sick and dying, there is no room left to bury the dead, and food consists of government-processed pellets of soy and lentils – a different color for each day of the week. Tuesday is Soylent Green day. But Charlton Heston discovers the real source of Soylent Green – the bodies of the dead, ostensibly sent for cremation, but secretly converted into urgently-needed food! At the end of the film, dragged away by the police from yet another food riot, he raises a bloodied hand, shouting above the din “You gotta tell them! Soylent Green is people! Soylent Green is people!”
The movie explores no further. Perhaps we are to assume that the truth will out, and moral indignation will put a stop to this outrage. But if the truth were known what would we, could we, in fact do? Starve on Tuesdays? Would we not, rather, turn a judiciously blind eye?
Well, that moral lapse seems somewhat tame seen from the perspective of 2011...
Pablo
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