Last night was a rough night for sleep with Avery throwing a tantrum around 3:00am. She has been doing this lately & it is really 'inconvenient'. As I lay awake last night I was thinking of the Christian humanist Thomas More who wrote the fictional work Utopia. The Greek word: utopia actually means 'no place'. It is this work that More penned that gives us utopia meaning an imagined place or state of being perfect. Anyway, More used Utopia to comment on society and the problems he had with it. The propensity of war, government, religious intolerance were all addressed in the book as it was a fictional story about a character who traveled great distances and observed different functioning societies and in particular a place called - Utopia.
Obviously written work back then was quite different from the written word today, but last night I tried to think of present day examples of Thomas More's Utopia. One of the funniest versions that I came up with was the 80's sitcom Mork & Mindy starring a young Robin Williams and Pam Dawber. If you remember, towards the end of the series, they brought on comic Jonathan Winters as their child. Mork, being an alien from Ork (I believe) had children that were hatched from a giant egg and were elderly in appearance. They aged in reverse. The telling part of this was that our society tends to 'value' babies more than the elderly. So on the planet Ork, the babies are 'old', but as they get older they get cuter and 'cuddlier' and are taken care of 'better' as infants and babies. It is an interesting way of discussing the issue of geriatric issues. Another example I suppose would be the feature film Philadelphia with Tom Hanks in discussing AIDS in our society in the early 1990's. Again, it is interesting what your mind contemplates at 3:15am when your 2 year-old is throwing a tantrum and not letting you sleep.
More thoughts on other issues later...
Until next time...
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