I believe that there are certain
personal conflicts that run parallel throughout all human life that each of us
experience at different times and in different ways. I am convinced that one of
these is the maturation of a personal belief system that, while being a product
of one’s environment, is formulated independently of the beliefs of others. As
I was flipping through old issues of Time
Magazine in the library looking for articles that would fit this
assignment, I realized that there were defined ideological threads that
connected many of the articles to the previous statement concerning belief
systems. What interested me the most was that many of these articles were not
specifically about people, yet I still felt that the “coming of age” motif was
a prevalent aspect of these pieces.
One
of these articles was about the U.S. uranium industry and a study this
operation had done in 1960 on the correlation between working in uranium mines
and the prevalence of lung cancer.
The results were that lung cancer was almost five times higher in U.S.
uranium miners than in American men in general. The article goes on to talk
about meetings of rich, important people who talked of changes to alleviate
this problem and then failed to implement these changes to their full extent
while making sure they did just enough to look better than other nations.
Admittedly, my tone concerning this article is meant to be bitter. Personally,
I feel that the people in charge failed to protect their employees from a known
carcinogen in order to satiate their personal material cravings. Comparatively,
it seems like the U.S. uranium industry did attempt to do more than other
countries in the context of this dilemma, which I do believe is a sign of
maturation for our nation. Despite this, a lesson I learned as a child was that
doing the right thing tends to only matter if you do all of it. It does not
seem like the executives did the right thing, but then again, there is probably
a lot more to this story than what a magazine writer could fit into three
pages.
I
realize that trying to express the “coming of age” motif in the context of
ideas, and other inanimate or abiotic constructs, is abstract and probably a
stretch. It’s true that human life only loosely connects to the everyday
problems of nations, or the nebulous line between right and wrong. The
conflicts and environments of a nation or company, as opposed to a human, are
uniquely different, but both continue to grow and decay – rise and fall – have good
days and bad ones – live and die. I
guess what I’m trying to say is that life will happen regardless of our personal
agenda, and the decisions we make when faced with a conflict determine the
progression or regression of our lives either in our eyes or the eyes of those
around us. It seems to me that most aspects of life contain conflict, and
resolving conflict leads to growth and maturation. The growth, or “coming of
age”, of nations and companies could be seen as the maturation of humans as a
species, rather than as individuals. This is a concept I believe is fully
evidenced by the presence of more humane systems of government and the spread
of equality. I think that “coming of age” is present in all of these places and
ideas because when it comes down to it, depending on your religious beliefs,
everything is a direct or indirect construct of the human mind. If maturation
of ideas and one’s beliefs is a prevalent conflict in our minds, why shouldn’t that
be seen in what our minds create?
Hi Bryan, Thanks for the interesting -Time- post. Indeed, life will happen regardless of our personal agendas. That's a good point. Please make up all the blogs you are required to post. You are behind what;s expected at this point. dw
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