Response to “Children of the Screen” by Hannah Baylon

In the movie, “The Gods Must Be Crazy”, two different societies are exposed, the Bushmen and the civilized man. Both are human, but go about their human lives in totally dissimilar ways. As the movie states, the Bushmen adapt to their environment while the civilized man adapts the environment to him, melting metal to form cars, forming concrete sidewalks as paths, and planting gardens in only certain spots if space is available. But what is so great about being civilized? “Sophisticated” humans have only made their lives harder. By constructed a new environment that is “supposedly” easier to live in, they are sentencing all their future generations to more and more education in one direction of trying to become more urbane. Most humans have come up with the idea that the only way to be happy is to make a lot of money, and in a way, that is true, because of what society’s standards have set up for us. People who try to advocate for what they believe in, something different, a better way to live, support for coexistence, whatever they see fit in their eyes, are put in jail, beat to death, and exiled from their home country. According to Hannah Baylon, life has become so intricate for the civilized man that the only way to escape from that is to read, watch t.v., shop, or do anything that can give us a break from reality and that’s not extremely wrong, considering today’s lifestyle. Unfortunately, the media has taken advantage of people’s breaks in front of the t.v. and without noticing it, people are being brainwashed by today’s greedy businessmen of the media. People are beginning to think what they need is more video games, clothes, and a bigger house. We’re losing ourselves in this hedonistic world, and someday our culture may actually fully become capitalism, which is a type of economy, not a way of life. People need to learn what our society is doing to us, and see who they are as individuals, not as another product on the assembly line of life. We should look at our past and ancestors, our history and culture; was there anything wrong with what they believed in and did? Agreeing with Hannah Baylon, we should stop trying to adapt the world to us, and try to become one with the world and nature, as we were meant to do.
Who says that being civilized is better anyway? Since when is being civilized more refined and clever? Personally, we seemed to have degraded in the sophistication level. The human souls have depreciated. For instance, in “The Gods Must Be Crazy”, the Bushmen are not civilized in the way we define it, but their hearts are pure. They don’t even have a word in their language for guilty. When the coke bottle was introduced to them in the beginning of the movie they experienced feelings of greed, selfishness, and shame that they have never experienced before. They were truly a happy people with well-behaved children, a hard-working, cooperative, small society, love and care towards each other, and no desires for materialistic things; as such things were not available in their world. They survived on what they needed. The civilized humans, on the other hand, have developed greed along with modern inventions. Things are available to some that are not to others, causing jealousy. People wonder why there is war, hate, and murder in the world and it is exactly because of the act of trying to become civilized and trying to spread that supposed “knowledge”. Learning and expanding our knowledge is not bad, but the way we use our information is what shows our true intentions.