Hindsight is 20/20

   A large portion of this week's curriculum has been centered around analyzing documents and the ethical and moral values that they hold. For example, when the Declaration of Independence states that "All men are created equal," everyone besides the Thomas Jeffersons in the pinwheel discussion would point and dance on the fact that there was discrimination and falseness in those five words. The recurring theme of how it was wrong went throughout the rotations. However, I believe that it was not necessarily done with bad intentions.

    During the time period, slavery and discrimination were thought of as nothing more than what society was and will be. It would not be until much later that these ethics would be challenged and abolished; but even then, things wouldn't be completely fixed for another couple of hundred years. The thing that really inhibits generations from being able to instantly adopt all of the same principles and technologies of the future is that you don't know what you don't know. An easy way understand this is if you were to go back into time with the engineering details to a spaceship and present it to the engineers of the time, they wouldn't even be able to comprehend what they're looking at. However, if someone from the distant or even near future were to visit us and do the same thing with something such as a time machine, we would all have the same reactions as the previous group. Maybe one day we'll look back and think "How dumb were we to have used cars. The risk and danger are off the charts now that we all have private mechanized planes." 

   All of this is to help justify the fact that the founding fathers, contrary to what Fredrick Douglas said, are brave and brilliant people who shouldn't have a blemish on their portfolios for not being able to see past the veil that time has put on them.

Are Burials Selfish?

   Ever since the thought provoking discussion delving into the unseen meanings and symbolism in memorials, I've wondered about the ethics of cemeteries and burials itself. From the line "a catafalque is a platform made to hold a coffin," I started to look at the bigger scope of things and how coffins would impact everything in the long run.
   Although it seems as if I'm emotionally insensitive to the fact that people need closure with deceased loved ones, I'm strictly looking and questioning the environmental impacts of this action. After doing some light research on the topic, I've found statistics that express the true magnitude of this seemingly unnoticed situation. Things such as space taken up and pollution contribute to my overall argument.
   The first thing I'm going to talk is the space that burials and cemeteries would take up. With the 107 billion people who have existed on this Earth and the 7 plus billion currently living on the Earth, it's only a matter of time before the unusable space catches up to us. A large reason that the land is unusable is due to the fact that when someone is buried, it's not just a human corpse but rather hundreds of pounds of metal, wood, and chemicals. Although they won't decompose rapidly, they will eventually break down into the soil and water system, tainting the environment and the land in which they're buried that the living can never get back. In fact, this is very similar to one of the most controversial topics around today: nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is one of the most promising forms of clean energy around but has one fatal characteristic that makes most people uneasy: nuclear waste. The long-lasting and harmful effects it was on the environment lead people to hesitate when it comes to implementing it to large scale power. Surprisingly, this is not much different then coffin burials. As I have listed above, they share many of the same negative traits yet one receives a ton more attention than the other. I'm not saying that people should feel bad or stop conducting burials, but there should be a regulation or a new movement in the way that the dead are treated. Luckily, there have been many affordable, appealing, and most importantly environmentally friendly ways to have closure. Things such as cremation, giving nutrients to become trees, and even being made into a diamond have all been new up-and-coming alternatives to burials.