Here is my recommended song for this post.

So a lot has happened in our crazy world over the past few months and in light of that I haven’t been at school since March. I’m not complaining, I’ve caught up on my Netflix shows, I’ve been working out and I never wake up before 8:30. There are two things I have missed out on, one being my final ultimate season in high school and potentially club season, the other being my final months in high school. I am missing out on the normal graduation ceremony and don’t eat to spend my final months as a teenager with my friends. 

Despite all of that we have continued with schooling, much to my dismay. We have moved fully online which threw a slight wrench in some plans but nonetheless we have moved forward with our final formal unit of PLP, Dystopia. 

I must say it was a very topical unit and the COVID-19 pandemic only aided in our learning and thinking. We began by doing a small intro project based around what a utopia is (the opposite of dystopia). In groups we had to create our ideal utopia. I paired up with Robbie and Calum to tackle this. We created a place where there are no countries, no government and no war, people have the right to self government. There are three rules you cannot take what is not yours, you cannot kill, and you cannot force your way of life upon others. Now without any governments who is there to enforce these rules? Good question right? Well we have an answer, there is an over-watching body, sort of like an all powerful deity that deals with the people who disobey the rules. 

After formulating our presentation, we presented to the class along with the other presentations. The one thing I found interesting is that everyone’s utopias had an equal rights stance on things, everyone is deserving of anything. It reflects how our society today is operating, we are still struggling to reach those goals and many are actively seeking and advocating for those goals. 

After doing the utopia side of things we moved into the ever famous dystopia, now this is very much an English unit or least the focus was on English, despite it being applicable to recent history including the Cold War. So with that in mind I’m sure you can expect we read a book, where else would we find such rich dystopias then in fiction. We could choose between the classic 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, World War Z, and Station Eleven. 

I ended up with Station Eleven, it took place around the events of a pandemic and it seemed like it would more a tale of survival than what it actually was. I thought I was finally free of Shakespeare but that’s all the characters talked about (not really all but it certainly seemed that way). 

I’m not going to get into the specifics of the story so I’ll just cover a handful of touch points. 

There were a few things I really picked up on/noticed. The first was the ending. The story covered a timeline of 30 or so years and seemed almost like a snapshot of a select number characters and their minute connection to each other, it exposed the events of a catastrophic pandemic and ended almost as abruptly as it started. The climax was seemed like it was the death of one of the characters and it seemed majorly anti-climatic and the ending left me wondering what was going to happen next. There was no resolution, it just ended. The second was the aspects of human nature that was reflected in the story, it seemed when the entire world was ending people still held out hope that it would all magically disappear or that others survived the events with functioning aspects of the society that was destroyed. When all seems lost we as humans will still have a small part of us dream and hope for it all to just return to the seemingly “normal”. I definitely am hoping for that with the COVID-19 pandemic, but I’ll talk about that in a bit. 

I wasn’t all that happy with Station Eleven but my expectations were very different than what I read, I was really hoping for some action and mystery and the general sense of a post-apocalyptic thriller or something along those lines, instead I was met with an artistic view on how arts influence people when the world comes to an end. Not exactly something in my wheelhouse.

So on top of reading the books we also had to do journals for each section we read, so three journals in total. The idea behind the journals was to connect what we were reading to current events happening around us. I found that Station Eleven was pretty easy to connect. I looked at the connection to catastrophic events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and 9/11 change aspects of our world and day to day life, after 9/11 we saw huge security system overhauls changing airports, shipping ports and more. Who knows what we will see when the pandemic is over. I also looked at the human nature to hold out hope, and took a look at SGN and how we will always try to look for a silver lining within tough situations. Last I looked at the environmental impacts we are seeing, with nature returning to areas with lowered human activity, things are starting to heal in the atmosphere and emissions are trending in a good direction. It will be interesting to see how that shapes up post-pandemic. It will definitely influence my future career plans.

Upon finishing the books we all had a week to prepare a presentation answering the question “How do literary dystopias help us understand what is happening now?”. My group decided to compare the psychological impacts on people in pandemics and how we look to similar examples, typically in extreme cases to make us feel better about the situation we are in. Station Eleven was an extreme example of a pandemic so we look at how a situation can be so horrible and compare it to ours to make us feel better that we are not in such a bad situation. The other side of the coin is that we don’t watch or read any dystopias during a rough time, I know some people like that right now, because it will remind us of the situation we are in and work to instil more fear and anxiety. My group took a three pronged approach to the presentation, first using Station Eleven as one dystopic example, second using The Maze Runner as another example and third using research on the psychological impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was working on the current events research and what I found really interesting is that there is not much out there by way of studies and research on psychological effects during a pandemic such as the one we are experiencing. We just have never had something of this magnitude, the speculation is that their will be increased numbers of loneliness, depression anxiety and substance abuse but to what extent we don’t know.

We presented a keynote using some animations and charts to convey data from studies and statistical analysis done.

This was our last formal unit of PLP this year and technically of high school as well. I thought I was able to look at the current world events in a different light and start to piece together human responses and reasoning during stressful times. It was really interesting to look into that aspect of the human condition. We will see what the final month and a half of school holds but I look forward to graduating and moving into a new chapter of my life.