Snowed In

I worked until 5pm yesterday and like all other idiot New Englanders, ran to the grocery store in a semi-panic.

The parking lot was jammed and I've never seen so many people in the grocery store. People were running around the isles, shopping carts filled to the gills. I, myself, probably bought 50% more food than I needed but hey, I am a zany New Englander in pre-blizzard mode.

So, I got home yesterday, parked my car, pulled out all my grocery bags and checked the mail. The Mummy had come from Amazon.com! What perfect timing.

So I went to bed to wake up at 6 a.m. I looked outside and a good 12 inches of snow had accumulated and it was blowing around crazy like. My furnace kept going off again and again. I made some muffins for breakfast (blueberry and chocolate chip) and after gorging out on that, watched The Island and Storm. Two great flicks.

The Island is a cross between Gattica and The Matrix. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansen are two people who live on Earth after a "Contamination". They are survivors and live in this incubator type of world were everyone has been decontaminated. All the people where white track suits, eat and exercise and live a very super healthy life style. The big thing with this place is that everyone wants to win The Lottery, a random drawing for people to go to last vestige of non-contaminated earth: an Eden-like island. Scarlett's character, Jordan, is the latest winner of the lottery. Lincoln (Ewan), being the inquisitive troublemaker, sneaks into sectors where he's not authorized to go. He sees winners of the Lottery getting killed and shaken, goes back and runs away with Jordan. They get out of their world and get above ground...where they see that no "Contaminiation" has occured. They find a worker at the instituion whom Jordan befriended. He tells them that they are clones. As they adjust to their reality and that their "owners" have had them produce as medical insurance policies against death and disease, they outrun a crack-group of ex-militia men (navy seals, delta force). Eventually, Lincoln meets his "owner", who is a real jackass and has Hepititis from his "many sexual encounters" and was going to harvest Lincoln's liver within two years. Lincoln asks for his help but his owner just calls the institution. Eventually, the militia men chase them down, and Lincoln turns the table around on his jerk of an "owner" and the leader of the group hunting them down shoots the "owner".

Well, within all this movie, you see a sequence of situations where people are continually put into ethical situations and they need to chose the right or the wrong way ethically. Some, like the doctor who runs the institute and Lincoln's owner, chose the wrong path. Others, like the leader of the militia corp hired to hunt down the two escaped clones, Lincoln and the institution worker who was befriended by Lincoln, turn out to make the right decisions. And you see how easy it would be for them to just not bother with the ethical but harder path taken.

What really bothers me is the idea of cloning. And how easy it would be for cloning to become something horrific and holocaust-like: the production of human life to replace parts on people who can't come to terms that they have to die like everyone else.

And so, I come into an argument with myself. I would say I am for research that would help us to eradicate disease, but what moral and ethical standards will hold science in its proper framework?

In this movie, the owners of the clones had the money to buy a clone, and some for ridiculous reasons: to have new skin for a face lift, a new liver because some rich man is alcoholic, or because a rich woman doesn't want to ravage her body with a pregnancy. What does this mean? Where are we as humans going? We are capable of such atrocities, but such beauty. I continue to ponder this and hope that in my life, my contributions will weigh predominantly on the beauty side.