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Analysis Of The Future Is Now

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Andrei Costin The Future is Now by Katherine Anne Porter What struck me so much about The Future is Now is the very premise of the essay. She starts with a description of how she was told to protect herself from a nuclear bomb, and the instructions she was given that were evidently ineffective. She contrasts what she is told with her own logic; a table won’t protect you from the bomb, it will only protect you if someone may be throwing bricks at your window. A major part of why this essay was so enjoyable is Porter’s word choice. Her language selection aides in conveying her story with vivid imagery, almost putting me in her place. Her descriptions are remarkable, using phrases such as “comic anticlimax” when a much simpler phrase would …show more content…

This works because she is comparing it to past advances in military technologies but claims it just increases the kill count. She uses examples of the silencer, the tank, the machine gun, and others to prove that these advances keep coming, only further increasing the kill count, and that we shouldn’t all go into a moralistic frenzy over the numbers of people killed in Hiroshima, because it isn’t the first time we have murdered innocent people and it won’t be the last, the only thing that changes is the number. “It is our own deaths we fear, and so let’s out with it and give up our find debauch of moralistic frenzy over Hiroshima.” This change in argument works because as fearful as this new technology is, there will be more fearful in the future, and other advances in the past garnered the same reaction from the population of its time. This new technology is horrendous and immoral, truly so, but we must not get taken aback by it, as more will come. Wars have never been moral, killing isn’t moral, technological advances in the field of the military are as moral as the rest. I think the final reason I found this essay so compelling was its relevance in today’s world. The topic of nuclear war is as prominent as ever in our society, yet to any of us who weren’t alive during the second world war to see the only instances of this weapon ever used, it seems so foreign. And to see such a passionate, rational, and objective view

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