HW 32 - Thoughts following illness & dying unit

       Throughout this unit, I've come to understand the maxim that "culture is reflective of society" (John Tabor).  Our dominant social practices that surround illness and dying not only reveal what we believe is acceptable but, also what we are afraid of.  While death is certainly something we have all at one point in our lives feared, we are oblivious to the fact that we create nightmarish atrocities, that are possibly just as bad as death itself, to avoid death.  An example of a nightmarish atrocities is our hospitals.  Hospitals can be seen as safe havens or even disease ridden areas.  Regardless of how one may view hospitals, hospitals are essentially factories.  Factories in which specimen, in other words- us, are refurbished, placed in windowless rooms, hooked up to bulky machines, and made to be sufficient once more.  Admittedly, viewing hospitals in such way is considerably morbid however, this doesn't change my view of how we deal with sickness and death.  We would like to think that we, the masses, have the power to play death with our access to technology and expensive treatments but, our actions only reveal our need to cleanse what is dirty, as illness has been stigmatized by society.  After realizing the uniformity we use to deal with death, the uniformity and nightmarish atrocities apart from this unit have become clear and most certainly scary.  Schools, in which we are bound by law to attend, are the epitome of factories as students are trained and induced with knowledge essentially in order to be able to acquire a job that will more or less create the foundation of how a person will be able to sustain themselves when pertaining to either money or shelter.  It goes without saying that school does provide useful knowledge and common sense but, the true incentive of society for its adolescents to finish school is to create fine, sophisticated, and ultimately model citizens that pose as our nation's pupils.