During one of our first few meetings in our World Literature class last trimester, our professor asked us to describe our ideal world in a piece of paper. After that, she asked us one by one to read our answers in front of our class. Most of my classmates mentioned the usual motherhood descriptions – a world where there is love and peace, no violence and poverty, etc. When it was my turn to read my piece, I realized how deviant my answer was. Now this isn’t verbatim anymore because the paper was never returned to us so I don’t remember exactly how I wrote it back then, but it was something like this:
“An ideal world for me is a world where there is no discrimination. I mean, we’re more than 6 billion people living in the same planet. We’re bound to have different cultures, personalities, principles and beliefs. If we could find a way to respect each other’s differences then we can live in an environment where we can freely be ourselves and pursue the path for our own personal fulfillment. That would be really nice.”
And with that answer, I was crowned the next Mister Universe 2009. Haha! Kidding! So anyway, my answer to that simple pop quiz in World Lit class came to mind when I watched the sci-fi movie District 9 with a couple of high school buddies.
A quick Wiki search will tell you that District 9 is a 2009 South African science fiction film whose story was adapted from a 2005 short film entitled Alive in Joburg that deals with the issues of xenophobia social segregation. The title and premise of District 9 were inspired by historical events that took place in South Africa during the apartheid. In the movie, prawn-like aliens were confined in a residential slum and are not allowed to mingle with the humans. How such physically stronger creatures (as depicted in the movie) let humans boss them around is beyond me, haha, but then again, this isn’t one of those movies wherein the aliens want to invade the earth.
I won’t go on and spoil the story details and ending because I don’t want to do that and this is not a movie review anyway (although I highly recommend that you catch the movie). I just want to share that I feel respect is the most important thing for an ‘ideal world’ – more than love or peace. I don’t think plain love is enough because sometimes, the patronizing kind of love can drive us to be selfless and insensitive to other people. And for plain peace to be enough, then we should all be the same person so as to not have dissimilarities. And I suppose ultimately, love and peace is not genuine with the absence of genuine respect.
“An ideal world for me is a world where there is no discrimination. I mean, we’re more than 6 billion people living in the same planet. We’re bound to have different cultures, personalities, principles and beliefs. If we could find a way to respect each other’s differences then we can live in an environment where we can freely be ourselves and pursue the path for our own personal fulfillment. That would be really nice.”
And with that answer, I was crowned the next Mister Universe 2009. Haha! Kidding! So anyway, my answer to that simple pop quiz in World Lit class came to mind when I watched the sci-fi movie District 9 with a couple of high school buddies.
A quick Wiki search will tell you that District 9 is a 2009 South African science fiction film whose story was adapted from a 2005 short film entitled Alive in Joburg that deals with the issues of xenophobia social segregation. The title and premise of District 9 were inspired by historical events that took place in South Africa during the apartheid. In the movie, prawn-like aliens were confined in a residential slum and are not allowed to mingle with the humans. How such physically stronger creatures (as depicted in the movie) let humans boss them around is beyond me, haha, but then again, this isn’t one of those movies wherein the aliens want to invade the earth.I won’t go on and spoil the story details and ending because I don’t want to do that and this is not a movie review anyway (although I highly recommend that you catch the movie). I just want to share that I feel respect is the most important thing for an ‘ideal world’ – more than love or peace. I don’t think plain love is enough because sometimes, the patronizing kind of love can drive us to be selfless and insensitive to other people. And for plain peace to be enough, then we should all be the same person so as to not have dissimilarities. And I suppose ultimately, love and peace is not genuine with the absence of genuine respect.
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