The Road

I saw a wonderful, but disturbing movie. "The Road" depicts a father and son surviving in a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape. They are journeying to the cost in a desperate attempt to survive. Civilization has fallen and the world is filled with people who are either dying or dead. In this world they are trying to go down the road, trying to stay one of the "good guys." In this world the lives of people are a desperate struggle to survive. There is nothing to keep the world alive. Nothing grows anymore. The skies are dark and bleak and no light shines in the gray skies. People are either searching for food or eating each other to survive. The scenes depicting cannibalism are difficult to watch and I have to wonder how and what I would do to live in a world like that. I would hope that I would not resort to something like that to survive. But they were disturbing. People eat each other and that is not a good thing.

I have always wondered about the end of the world. How this wonderful thing called civilization is such a fragile thing. How easily we take such a fragile thing for granted. How easy it is for civilization to end. A disaster can strip away the veneer of our civilization and leaves us savages. In that we are but animals without that veneer.

A movie filled with that bleakness can be a depression. Sometimes a world can touch you in a way that you cannot believe. We like to think we are not animals. Somehow we are blessed with a special gift with that civilization. Its only a thing and a very empty thing. I hope that if it does fall, we learn the lessons of our literature.