Everyone should have the joy of taking Mr Owen’s 11th grade English class (especially honors). This man took your brain and threw it into a blender. He told stories of how he was a mo-hawk punk kid who stabbed his step father’s kosher fish in the bathtub with a pair of scissors. He was one of those teachers who you will always remember. He spoke of literature as if it was some secret mystery to be solved. Every metaphor, every description had a secret meeting, you just had to figure it out!

The Scarlet Letter

“Hester looked at the armor and did not like her reflection”

The armor is a symbol of the old world. WHAT?

The reflection means that the old world is not the world Hester belongs to. WHAT?

As a 16/17 year old kid, you assume that when someone says “she did not like her reflection,” it means, she did not like her reflection. But to realize that it has some secret deep meaning that you have to interpret, WHOA.

It sounds simple (at least to me) now. Duh, why else would the author even mention the armor reflection (well Dickens was paid by the word for some stories)?

Anyways, ever since the amazing Mr. Owens I look at the world differently. Sometimes a reflection is just a reflection, but other times it means the whole world.

Anyways, I was trying to sleep and I was thinking about the movie Babel.

On the surface, it is like 21 grams, allot pain…everything is connected, you have to know the movie. Then on top of the similarities of 21 grams, it has a biblical significance. Apparently none of my friends know the story of the Tower of Babel so other than the wiki link, here is my brief synopsis: the people of the world unite and try to build a tower to heaven, they got close to heavan, so God destroyed it, and split up the world into different languages so the people could not work together like that again. (Sounds like fork-lore or Greek mythology to me, but whatever). Anyways, get it BABEL, people of different languages, of different worlds, all somehow connected, all feel the same universal pain!

Yay. I hope you get it!

Anyways, that illusion is obvious (again at least to me- not everyone got Mr. Owens, I am sorry you dont see these things).

But my thoughts were entirely different. I saw Babel as an example of the Modern World destroying older civilizations.

~~~Spoiler Alert~~~

If the Japanese man had not “helped” the Moroccan man by giving him the gun, no one would be shot.

If the American tourists had not been there, no one would be shot.

If the American terrorism issue was not exploited, that boy would not have been killed.

As for the Mexican-Americans….

If it was not for our border patrol, for our disrespect to other peoples, for our laws, those people would have never gotten left in the desert.

What I am saying is, the Moroccans, the Mexicans, the non-third world peoples’ lives were ruined because of OUR interference.

Just like colonialism, just like how we created Saddam Hussein, just like the massacres in Africa, it is the modern world forcing itself upon the third world that causes so much destruction.

AND

As the movie points out, the destruction comes back to us. The American got shot, because our modern world interfered, the kids got left in the desert, because our laws and borders interfered. It all comes full circle.

Saddam Hussein is the best example. We created him for our own self interest and he turned on us, now look at the state of Iraq. It all comes full circle.

This makes perfect sense to me, but if you feel I am wrong/confused, or I am not explaining my idea well enough please let me know.

-Ala