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Fundemental questions

Do you know the book The Giver? Your children probably do. It has been popular for sometime now. It is a story written by Lois Lowry about an ostensibly utopian society in which all memories of the human past have been suspended.
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Do you know the book The Giver? Your children probably do. It has been popular for sometime now. It is a story written by Lois Lowry about an ostensibly utopian society in which all memories of the human past have been suspended. People live together in community constructed by a state wherein they are literally shielded from the senses that drive human compassion and human hatred. The world is colorless and devoid of meaningful choices. Only one person in the entire society, the Giver, holds the memories of the past and he must give those memories to a young boy, the Receiver, who will then hold the memories of the past. Like most utopian stories it does not take long for things to unravel and for the joy and pain of human choice to be revealed and then desired by the young receiver of the memories.

The book has recently been made into a motion picture and it is a stark telling of the story. I am not a movie critic so I'll leave that work to someone else but, for me, the film brings to life very well what Lowry must have imagined when she thought of a world devoid of colour. The book did not impact me in the same way as did the film in regard to this idea of the erasure of colour. As the old Giver walks through the community with the young Receiver, the Giver tells him that the elders removed colour in order to create equality.

Until this point in the film the boy has not seen a human being of colour. The Giver has only shared the memory of the red hair of a young girl and the bright red of a delicious apple. But soon, as the young Receiver is introduced to painful human memories, he "watches" as a young black soldier dies from a bullet wound to the chest. The soldiers eyes suddenly become dim and empty. In the shared memory of what is clearly the Vietnam war, the Receiver, in a fit of grief and rage, shoots a female soldier. Once he returns to reality the boy begins to understand why human memories have been erased. But then he learns of love and suddenly the loss of choice about the ownership of memory is not so easy to justify. The utopia is not so utopic anymore.

In works of fiction we are so often brought to the fundamental questions of philosophy and political science. How should we live together? How much choice is enough? Who should restrict choice and what will we lose if we cannot be free agents of our own will?

And, what of colour? How is it we still live in a world in which we make distinctions about human character based on colour? I asked my students this question the other day. Earlier that morning I had watched Ferguson burn on "Good Morning America." The irony of the show's title was not lost on me.....or anyone else I suppose.

President Obama called for peace and an examination of existing law. He called for community leaders to unite and to examine some of the systemic problems that created the situation We've heard it before of course. Before Ferguson there was the Trayvon Martin case. And yet it was an African American President who was saying, "We've come so far."

So what is the answer? How far can a state go to educate the public against racism? What does it mean to say that we have to examine the laws that allow "this sort of thing" to happen? Why ask community leaders to do the work?

The answer comes in Obama's call to Americans in which he compels citizens to see that the solution to this problem probably exists somewhere between the state and civil society. The problem, which I think that Obama knows all too well, is that Americans are rapidly losing faith in both civil society and the state.

I am not normally a pessimist but watching Ferguson burn and immigration reform stall and Congress and the President in a constant deadlock, there is not a lot of room for optimism. Utopia does not exist but it seems to me that we should be a little bit closer to it.