I’m currently reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It was recommended by my biology lecturer a month ago. I’m also reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four at the same time. These cover dark topics, even though one is non-fiction and the other fiction (a fiction…). What strikes me is that the former is about a biological disease, whereas the other is a social disease, but I see a similarity in the formation of these. A group of cells or people within the inner network corrupt the body or in a social context, create a totalitarian state: a gross distortion of normal drive to control and create divisions by ignoring stop signals. A global pattern is social metastasis.
I’m noticing something interesting about wearing poppies in the UK. I was wearing a small pin of one today and haven’t noticed a lot of people wearing one. Then I did my search online and came across a political dichotomy about it. I find it sad, because poppies originally symbolised remembering soldiers and civilians who died in WWI, and also remembering what their families have went through. It got expropriated to become a symbol of political patriarchalism and extreme nationalism. It is sad, because people did die; it doesn’t matter about biology that determines ethnicity and gender. We bleed the same (do you know where I’m coming from?). I find it disrespectful to the families and descendants of these people who have died, as it’s become simplified as a political extremism of ‘us’ and ‘them’, because it undermines intergenerational trauma caused by the world war. It’s good to be mindful and not have the ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality (or even sitting with it, but not react), because I think that’s how civil unrest starts.