Now there is a strippling of white caught on the edge of things, and I wonder what would happen to us all if the planes came, and the bombs. It's one thing to look at snow from a lighted, steam-heated room; it's one thing to walk out with lifted face and woollen clothes a few inches thick. But to live out in that white world, to scratch for a living from the withdrawn lavender trees, the pale frozen ground. But the squirrels would still be there, and the birds. Long after, unless the smoke and the radioactivity (oh, Marie Curie, if you could know!) got them. In the back of my mind there are bombs falling, women & children screaming, but I can't describe it now. I don't know how it will be. But I do know that nothing will matter much. I mean whether or not I went to House Dance or to a party at New Year's. It is amusing to wonder whether dreams would matter at all, or "freedom" or "democracy." I think not; I think there would only be the wondering what to eat and where to sleep and how to build out of the wreckage of life and mankind. Yet, while America dies like the great Roman Empire died, while the legions fall and the barbarians overrun our tender, steak-juicy, butter-creamy million-dollar-stupendous land, somewhere there will be the people that never mattered much in our scheme of things anyway. In India, perhaps, or Africa. they will rise. It will be long before everyone is wiped out. People live in wartime, they always have. There was terror down through history - and the men who saw the Spanish Armada sail over the rim of the world, who saw the Black death wipe out half of Europe, those men were frightened, terrified. But though they lived and died in fear, I am here; we have built again. And so I will belong to a dark age, and historians will say "We have found documents to show how the common people lived at this time. Records lead us to believe that a majority were killed. But there were glorious men." And school children will sigh and learn the names of Truman and Senator McCarthy.
Sylvia Plath. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.
Edited by Karen V. Kulkil. (Faber & Faber 2000).
Germaine Greer wrote an article in The Sunday Times of 2nd July in which she writes 'I never said the sexual revolution would be pretty’. In the 1960s she had called for women to express their sexuality (burn their bras) but now says that pole dancing, breast implants and raunch culture are destructive not liberating. The very idea that men and women are fashioned for specific jobs whether true or not does not go down well in society today, we tend to shy away from agreeing to any strict behavioural code. As a result, relegation of fundamental socio-ethical institutions (such as marriage or burial of the dead) to the passe plays havoc with society. But as any Labourite would tell you "We're going up and up and up". We've gone way too far and have done irreparable damage to humanity and the nature of life on Earth. We live in a Capitalism-gone-awry, political-correctness-gone-mad and liberation-gone-crazy culture which is fast engulfing the entire world. We're fast heading the way of previous civilizations that were destroyed and this is a matter of the gravest concern. Though such apocalyptic messages have been blurted out all throughout the ages, it is not to say that the human race will be wiped out for mankind has always had a knack of surviving against all odds.