To Revolt?

Will The Others in Ahmed  Khalid Towfik’s novel Utopia revolt against The people of Utopia? I believe that they will. The novel ends with the uprising of The Others. And though The Others poor and deprived, they have power in numbers and they have determination. What do they have to lose? Their lives are already in ruins, they are already as poor as one can be. They are dying of curable diseases, they are starving, they are killing each other. What they have that the people of Utopia don’t is anger, poverty and nothing to lose. I don’t believe it will be easy or pretty, but nothing in the land of The Others is. The Others have been in poverty so long and have had their humanity stripped from them for so long, they have reached a breaking point, “As the saying goes, ‘the rock endured many blows but it only shattered on the fiftieth. ‘ It’s not the fiftieth blow that did that but all the previous ones” (153).

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The question was brought up in class: will the US ever revolt? My belief is that we will. When things are bad enough, when the average person in the US  has been dealt their fiftieth blow. While we can hope that things never become as divided as they are in Utopia, there is a general unease these days as the middle class becomes more and more obsolete. I am of a generation who will live a shorter life than my parents because I don’t have access to affordable healthcare. I will never make enough money to own a home. I am tens of thousands of dollars in student debt though I’ve managed to live my entire life debt -free besides. There is no guarantee I will have a job when I’m out of college and if I do, there is definitely no gurantee my job will pay enough to cover the repayment of student loans, healthcare, rent, a balanced diet, not to mention a little set aside for fun. The distribution of wealth in the US is so off-kilter that it eventually will have to change.  There will reach a breaking point if things continue to progress as they are. There was an attempt with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and while they weren’t successful, I believe it was just the beginning of an eventual revolution. The French did it. The US did it in 1783 and I believe if things don’t change, we will do it again.