This chapters read should really come with a warning label. I had just sat down to have my delicious salad that I made for myself with so much love. I cut up romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, avocados, croutons and I splashed a mixture of cilantro & avocado plus Italian dressing over it. I was about to go in big on probably my 2nd bite when I read the first two introductory paragraphs to this chapter. I literally almost spit it out. I tried to begin the first paragraph past the introduction, and I can feel my throat getting thick. There is no way I’m having lunch now. I put foil over my salad, put it in my fridge, went outside to my patio and continued to read. What was a starving woman 2 minutes ago, now cannot even think about food for some time. Who knows actually how long? I have a weak stomach and amazing gag impulses when something is disgusting.
Nonetheless, this story is absolutely heartbreaking. My heart goes out to all the survivors and to those who couldn’t survive based on their values of not eating the dead bodies. It’s easy to think what one would have done under those circumstances, but truth be told, your perception changes as you are being challenged and your chances of survival are minimizing by the day. Everybody wants to live. Everyone wants to survive a plane crash. Not many do. What these people, some children, had to do in order to stay alive, after their wreckage was brutal.
Essentially, these survivors had to brain wash themselves into believing that because they were dead, and their souls were gone they were now meat. I can’t imagine all of the corpses laying covered in snow just waiting to be cut up and left like a dead carcass after a lion eats the flesh. It was also fascinating that one of the boys, Parrado, said to them that if need be, they could eat his mom and sister. I literally started crying. It moved me, but not in a good way. It just made me realize how terrible the circumstances must have been out there that the reality of his mom and sister being eaten was now just a topic of survival. I could and would never allow my child to be eaten.
This story was very moving and heartbreaking. It literally made me feel debilitated. One thing is for a mentally insane person for example Hannibal Lector to go around eating people and enjoying cannibalism, but another is to eat your friends and family for survival. It literally became survival of the fittest. The strongest, just as social stratification has shown, were at the top with more perks and the weaker ones were in levels below. Just as we are taught that in society there are levels of hierarchy, this is an easy example of how they are socially constructed and how beliefs are manifested to change as long as one person gets the next to agree and so on.
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