Summary
According to Norman Cousins, Unkempt Generation is the time that has problems of sloppiness, happened not only among college students but all the society. People pursue sloppiness on purpose to look untidy.
There are four aspects that unveil how people perform sloppiness in their lives. First, clothing like blue jeans is apt to be tattered and unclean. Manufacturers thus cater to this fashion and make prices higher if the jeans look more antique. Besides, wearing oversize sweaters and muddy sneakers is not for feeling comfortable but for being unique, which shows blindness of pursuing fashion and unwillingness to be “cookie cutters.” Second, slovenliness and violence in language occur when people communicate. People use incoherently chopped-up phrases and even tastelessly four-letter words when talking, leading to their being “linguistic paupers.” Screenwriters and motion-picture exhibitors prefer the R rating than the G rating because of the theory of forbidden fruit and thus provide audience the foul language and bloody scenes. Third, casual attitudes toward cruelty and violence contribute to reacting suffering with apathy. Cousins claims that children cannot outgrow casual attitudes toward brutality because materials with depreciating humans will not develop respect for life but desensitize children. Finally, sloppiness in clothing, speech, emotions eventually affects human relationships. Casual sex, as shown in movies, runs the risk not of indulging in sexual pleasures but of feeling nothing and harming privacy.
Although Cousins does not want to make clichéd remarks, he hopes that the phenomenon of sloppiness will vanish and that designers, motion-picture and television producers and exhibitors can create works that are truly beneficial to human beings. Cousins finally put emphasis on “genuine creativity” and the way that “we locate the best in ourselves and put it to work.”
Response
Conventional as Cousins was, I agreed with some of his view points. To prevent the world from being chaotic, many conventionalists like Cousins denounced oddity in everyday life. However, if everything became neat and normal, what were the differences between you and others? We should seek ways that could balance neatness and sloppiness.
In my viewpoint, the decline of sloppiness in emotion and human relationship was necessary because the two aspects played important roles in our personalities. As for sloppiness in emotion, I could not agree with Cousins more. If we could not be sympathetic when seeing others’ suffering, we were mere puppets rather than human beings. Children were affected by violence even more greatly, for they could not know motivation behind violence and would be affected after their childhood. Furthermore, I was confused about casual sex and somewhat agreed with Cousins. In Sex and the City, characters always had opportunity to have sex with countless boyfriends or strangers. Did they learn anything from sexual experience? Would they be tired of having sex? I was also curious about whether audiences would think that casual sex was true and put it into practice. However, Sloppiness in clothing was not as serious as Cousins thought. Everyone was different from others and thus possessed different perspectives on clothing. Clothing was that what you thought was normal did not always be accepted by others. Besides, one who was dressed in sloppy jeans did not mean that he spoke four-letter words, felt nothing when seeing violent films, and had casual sex and vice versa.
We should pursue the neatness that could lead us to respect for life and believe in genuine love. Nevertheless, we did not need to request ourselves to doing anything with neatness. For example, when having leisure time, we should take a rest and allow a little bit sloppiness because too much pressure was not beneficial to us. In conclusion, making a good balance between neatness and sloppiness was necessary in our everyday lives.
Good opinion, you have hit the point that I want to convey. The world is full of differences; if we stick to conventional methods and disparage other transformations that in fact not as harmful as they had thought, where does creativity come from?
回覆刪除As you had said, what we should pursue are proper neatness and basic veneration. Although some behaviors such as no sympathy or over casual toward sex go too far, there is no reason reject all imperfection. Your conception reminds me of a video game I had played several months ago. A clergy want to revise the history of the world and control all the process of human life; then eliminate so-called corruption inside people’s heart, unifying all people’s thought to graciousness. To prevent her plan from success, several main characters stave off her plan once and again. One of the lines the protagonist say is: People have their own emotion, have their way of thinking, which is what makes the world meaningful; you have no right to change their way of life at will. Although not so extreme in the real world, the line conveys a notion of importance of individuals. Hence, we should not easily label something we just don’t like as nonsense or slavish conformity, not all behavior is as acute as he thought.