rrzhang001's Weblog Site • NuTang.com

watching: K-On
listening to: 开不了口
mood: Intellectually deficient

For no reason whatsoever, I was really fired up this afternoon, so I began, out of the blue, to write an essay.

It appears that the sloth of summer has rendered me depleted. I have truly lost my edge, no longer to even complete an essay that would have been so easy two months. And I have SATs in October.

I'm so screwed.

If anyone is interested, the partially-completed essay is pasted below. If you see any grammatical mistakes, prompt warning to the inept author is encouraged.

Arbitrarily Sacred
Humans have an innate need for order stemming from our wish to have mastery over our environment. We like to plan our cities in geometric shapes, have buildings whose contours are either straight or easily modeled by first-year math. Paradoxically, this �need� also brings about the arbitrary nature of many mundane aspects of human lives: names are often listed alphabetically; street cleaning occurring on the first Wednesday of every even month; a week has seven days� Of course, these are, after all, mundane subjects, and surely not of any great consequence. Yet even what we consider �sacred� is rather arbitrary.
The Anglican-Protestant dominated country of America has two distinct factions, �pro-choice� and �pro-life�. These two factions fight over the right of an unborn baby versus the freedom of the parents. The two hold one thing in common though, they believe in the difference between the pre-birth fetus and the post-birth �baby�. Of course, there are major differences between these two fragile entities. As the diminutive creature takes its first breath, the foramen ovale closes, the ductus venosus becomes obsolete, and the umbilical blood vessels cease to function. These changes are biologically important, but does it really affect the �life� of that entity? That tiny offspring was as self-conscious a few minutes before the birth and after the birth, so why the dividing line? The offspring isn�t any more �alive� inside the womb than out. If indeed the �life� itself is sacred, then the fetus should be considered sacred at all times; if that were true, then wouldn�t all other animal lives be sacred, because our fetuses are so similar? One might argue it�s the potential to become that amounts to the �sacredness�. Another problem arises, where exactly do we end the measurement for this �potential�? Shall contraceptives be outlawed, or should our offsprings only be �alive� and �sacred� when it makes the transition from an embryo to a fetus ? With the concept of �potential� involved, the argument becomes endlessly complicated. On the other hand, if that issue is ignored, then the next non-arbitrary turning point would be when a child could pass the Mirror Test. Surely self-awareness is where we can draw the line between �abortable� and �otherwise�. However, as most humans would cringe at the �abortion� of a baby several months of age, such is not practical. The debate of abortions shall continue on an arbitrary line.

Categories: Life [t]