Brittany Coppinger - Post 5

I really enjoyed reading the stories by Butler. I love her style of writing and i think she brings up really interesting topics to think about. In "The Evening and the Morning and the Night", I was intrigued by the idea that a cure for something was the destruction of something else. In the story, there was a cure for cancer, something that we, in this reality, have been desperately searching for. In the story, however the cure just created a problem. This seems to be a recurring theme in history. How many times has something initially perceived as good turned into something that just does more harm then good? We rush into things without thinking them through fully. And sometimes even when we do think things through, there are consequences we can not even imagine. We all think that finding a cure for cancer would be one of the best things our society has ever done, but at what price? What if finding a cure does release some other incurable disease onto our society? What if you have to kill someone to cure some one else? Is it worth it? In advancing society, where do the costs start to outweigh the benefits? What if we lose something that we take for granted?

That idea is discussed in "Speech Sounds." Communication is vital to our society, but I don't think many people realize just how amazing our level of communication is. In the story, it was a disease that wiped out their ability to use language, but I still think we can learn a lesson from that story. We need to cherish our ability to use language. There are so many words and so many combinations of those words that will allow us to display how we feel. We are doing ourselves a disservice when we do not use out ability for language to its fullest. Every time we scream and resort to violence is a blow to language and a step backward for communication.