The Innocence Blog #1

The Innocence Blog #1

The World that we live in seems unfair and evil. There are things like inequality, society standards, pain, emotions and life is unpredictable and you never know what is going to happen.  For example, the war that is going on overseas is a terrible thing. There are hundreds if not thousands of people dying every day from the war. The war will take a mental toll on anyone who has to go be sent across the sea.  

In the song “The end of the innocence” they are talking about Daddy having to go to war, they talk about him “having to fly”. To me that sounds like he must have to fly overseas or has to fly in a shooter plane. It mentions a lot of key factors that resemble the military and war. here is one line that keeps repeating though the whole song “this is the end of the innocence” which being in the military and seeing what you have to see your innocence would be affect in a very negative way.   

You wouldn't be the same person you were before you went to the war because, even the worst thing you have seen in your own innocent life, wouldn't even come close to what you would be seeing on the battlefield. A few lines down it mentions how the skies are no longer beautiful, they are threatening. I believe he has a flashback to his home for a few seconds seeing the dangerous and gloomy sky reminded him how peaceful it was back home. In the second to last paragraph, it says “I know a place we can go and wash away our sins” when I listened to the song for the first time got the impression that he had that flashback to his home and that all he's thinking about, was the last time that he saw his home.  

In the story Feaver Dream I believe that it is about having a mental illness which isn't uncommon especially in today's world, not that there weren't any before, but people are more open and willing to talk about it now a days. The story talks about a boy named Charles who strongly believes that his limbs are no longer his. The story could be talking about puberty and how he's becoming a man but if you dig deeper, it sounds like he's talking about having a mental illness. One of the lines that really stood out to me was when the narrator said, “he lay in a fascinated horror and then fell into an exhausted sleep”. A lot of mental illnesses will make it extremely hard for it to shut off your mind when it's time to go to bed. To me that line sounds like he was extremely over tired and possibly hallucinating from sleep deprivation.  

This story was written in 1948 and back then they didn't have much knowledge about mentally ill people, and it was a taboo to even talk about it. I read an article about how they treated “sick” people back in the day and they said they usually used physical methods like restraint. That caught my attention because in the story they said to the mother “be sure his hands are kept strapped to his legs.” (At the time, medical practitioners often treated mental illness with physical methods. This approach led to the use of brutal tactics like ice water baths and restraint.)  

To connect it all together I think that the mental illness that Charles had was PTSD since a lot of the things he said didn't really make sense and he seemed to be genuinely scared for his life and limbs. From my perspective I would argue that he has PTSD from the war, since he thinks he has the power to kill things, just like the ants which he probably stepped on. “He saw the ants hesitate, quiver and lie still on the cement. He knew they were cold now” It mentions in the story about his canary how he stood back and waited...for it to die.  He said that he wanted to play and wrestle with the kids, which would end up killing them. I thought all this was very odd but looking into it deeper and connecting these two stories I feel that it makes sense.