the reason for the reason for

THE REASON FOR
OUR HOPE
The Austin Magazine – Spring 2014
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THE REASON FOR
OUR HOPE
The Austin Magazine – 2014
Editorial Staff
Emma Tilley
Jacey Richards
Meghan Bodette
Nicholas Marchetti
Louis Finocchiaro
Garrison White
With special thanks to:
Ms. Sheila Foley, Ms. Massoudeh Edmond, Ms. Jeanne Maurand, Mr. Ed Meek, Mr. Jay Dowd, Mr.
Chris Moore, and the many members of the eighth grade class who assisted in preparing the magazine
for publication.
Moderator
Mr. Lane
Austin Preparatory School
101 Willow Street
Reading, Massachusetts 01867
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Contents
Cover …………………………………………………….……………………………………………………..……………Drawing, Jennifer Cha
Inside front cover…………………………………………………………...…………………………………..Drawing, Mary Lee Yujeong
5, 11, 32..………………………………………...……………………………………………...…Painting, Skater; Drawing, Jennifer Cha
6………………………………………………………………………………...…………………...………………Song to Myself, Irina Noonan
7...………………………………………………………………….…………………………………Lilies, Roses, & Daffodils, Renee Leavitt
7, 30….…………………………………………………………………………..…………………..…………….Paintings, Amanda Bransfield
8…………………………………………..………………………………………….………………………… Where Are the Stars?, Lena Syed
8, 16…………………………………..…………….…………………….I Hear the Leaves; Forming Into Society, Margaux Munick
9………………………………………………….………………………………………...……………….Ice Water in Summer, Emma Tilley
9………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..……………Painting, Zachary Beeley
10, 34..………….…………………...……………….The Sky is a Constant Grey; With a Hat on Her Head, Ashlyn DeRoche
10, 13, 15.…………..……………………………………………………..Plea; Little Star; You Can’t Move Mountains, Julia Barry
12……………………………………………….…………………………….……Take One Thing at a Time; Dear You, Muriel Baillie
13……………………………………………………………...…………………………………………………..……….Painting, Cristina Gomez
14………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..……………Nicky, Julia Fraser
15, 27, 33..……………………………………..…………..….………The Current; The Day After; The Bronze Men, Sam Calias
16……………………………………………………………………………………………………...………..……Our Generation, Ben Pantazi
17………………………………………………………………………….…..……Is There Going to be a Breakthrough, Erin Fennessy
17……………………………….………………………………………………………..…………………………..……Apple, Lauryn Cappuccio
18, 24…………………………………….…………………………………………………………………………..……Macaws, Alina Kochocki
19…………………………………………………………….………………………………………………...…………..……Koi, Shannon Reddy
20………..…………………………………………………………………………………………………..…..……A Good Dog, Tim Connelly
20…..……………………………………………………………………..………………………………..…… This Is My Selfie, Dan Catalano
21……………………………………………………………..………………………………………..…It’s Time to Cut Loose, Max Murphy
21……….…………………………………………………………………………………….…..……They Make Me Laugh, Alissa Galligani
22………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……..…..……Skateboarding, Jay Garcia
22………………………………..…………………………………………………………………………………...…..……Shoes, Dylan Dalbeck
22…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..……..…..……Apple, Poppy Simmonds
23………………….……………………………………………………………….………………..…..……Our Generation, Cassandra Souza
23…………….……………………………………………………………….………………..…..……The Hypocritical Poet, Shane Sullivan
25………………...…………………………………………………………………...…..…..……If the Sky Is Blue at All, Meghan Bodette
27……………………………………………………………………………………….……...…………………..…..……Sailboat, Lillian Burkett
28...……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…..……America, Krystle Boyajian
29……………………………..…………………………..…..……Futurology, or “Dude, Where’s My Flying Car?”, Mike Gannon
31...……………………………………………………………..……………………………..…..……Deep Common Sense, Ben Pompilus
31...……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…..……Painting, Aleksey Gorman
33...……………………………………………………………..………………………………………..…..……Australia Dancing, Mike Nigro
34...……………………………………………………………………………..………………………………..…..……Painting, Catherine Ferri
Inside Back Cover...…………………………………………………………………..……………….....……Drawing, Mary Lee Yujeong
Back Cover...………………………………………………………………………………………………………..……Painting, Jennifer Jeong
Painting (On facing page)
Jennifer Cha
Within past centuries, mankind made numerous mistakes which led to mass destruction of life, both on
land and sea. Many lives were lost, and the land where life once proliferated got covered in blood and
ashes. The disasters created by human selfishness were gradually healed not by peace treaties, but by
children. The hopes of their children having a better world to live in motivated people to rise up and get
back on track. I yearn for the future where the nations truly achieve "world peace". —Jennifer Cha
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Song to Myself
Irina Noonan
I can feel the gush of wind
On this emotional rollercoaster
One second I’m happy and alive
The next I can feel the tearing in my chest
I wonder how much longer my emotions will continue going up and down
I try to stay positive and look on the bright side
Everything happens for a reason, right?
Well why can’t I get that through my head?
Only negative thoughts seep into my mind
Causing me to overthink and assume the worst
I wish I could just take a step back from it all
Clear my head
Start a new chapter.
However that seems impossible
When people are constantly bringing you down
No matter what you do
Even if it’s a good thing
Somebody will always have something negative to say.
I’ve learned that you can’t please everyone.
I often have to remind myself that what others say
Doesn’t define who I am,
But who they are.
I’ve also learned that you can’t control people;
How they feel and act is up to them
And I need to accept that.
Looking at the positive side is difficult at first
Because being positive can lead to disappointments
But if you’re negative and think of the worst,
Then only better things can come.
But is it worth it? To live your life being negative,
Or should you be positive
And look at every setback as an opportunity
To become a stronger person.
I choose to be positive.
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Lilies, Roses, and Daffodils
Renee Leavitt
Lilies, roses, and daffodils
Cherry pies on window sills
A baby's laughter of joy
When it plays with its brand new toy
Death destruction and rage
A lion got out of his cage
The news screams emergency alert
Four thousand just got hurt
Better and worse
The world has its curse
Help and harm
The future brings a charm
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Where are the Stars?
Lena Syed
I look at the sky
And I wonder why
Why I can’t see any stars
As I go back inside
In my mind I cry
Why are they gone?
Am I blind?
Am I out of my mind? Maybe they’re just too far
Ruining nature is what we buy
Incautiously we act, then everything dies
Can we give stars a shot?
For improvement there is still time
Even the slightest, even the most fine
Will aid the stars
Restricting ourselves from such a sight
It’s not the end of their lives
It’s that their light is blocked
We fear the night
But now its sky is too bright
We can’t see the stars’ sparks
I know stars are up high
We can’t see them though we have eyes
We ensconce the dark
I Hear the Leaves
Margaux Munick
I hear the leaves
I hear the leaves talking to me, laughing as they fall
The leaves blanket the ground, as they leave the trees bare
Farmers going and raking the leaves, hearing the fire roar as the leaves burn
I hear the leaves as they crinkle under my feet
Leaving the crushed piles behind as a trail
No one knowing where they came from
I hear the leaves, calm knowing that a new season comes
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Ice Water in Summer
Emma Tilley
You know what it’s like?
You ever jump into deep, freezing cold water, so that in the space of a second you go from standing comfortably on the shore to your entire body underwater and helpless at the whims of the currents? And every single cell is hyper-aware of being surrounded by and filling up with ice water, and your brain perceives
that with perfect blinding clarity, and nothing else can even enter your mind other than the fact that
you’re here. Some part of you knows that you’ll need to swim to the surface eventually, you’ll run out of
air eventually, but in the moment you’re completely still. Your very heartbeat is an unfamiliar force that
threatens to burst from within you. And you open your eyes, and all you see is blue, and reflected sunlight, and something inside you breaks and can’t process the sheer unearthly beauty. So you close your
eyes, and with sight and sound lost, you’re out of sync with the world, but at the same time, you exist in
complete unity with a separate world which is yourself. And thus, for about ten seconds, you come to
think you know what forever is like.
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The Sky is a Constant Grey
Ashlyn DeRoche
The sky is a constant grey
And you will never fade out of my mind
The wind keeps on blowing cold
I think air in my lungs but I do not care
And my heart is the one that hurts
Ripped out, thrown in the dirt
All dressed up, nowhere to go
Feel like a fool alone
But I still wait
But I still wait.
Plea
Julia Barry
I know that
We’ll manage somehow
Even the best people
Suffer a lot
We’ll manage somehow
I don’t want the children to
Suffer a lot
They’re all I have left
I don’t want the children to
Leave me alone
They’re all I have left
They keep me alive
Leave me alone
Don’t take them away
They keep me alive
Without them I’m lost
Don’t take them away
Please
Without them I’m lost
I won’t last a day
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Take One Thing at a Time
Muriel Baillie
Take one thing at a time
Even though it will be hard
It’ll be worth every dime
You might ask when you’ll shine
But just have a deep breath
Take one thing at a time
But when will I be ok?
When can I not worry?
We ask ourselves everyday
This morning is a climb
But everything pulls through
Take one thing at a time
What if the sun doesn’t have its ray?
What will change without it?
We ask ourselves everyday
Too much delay
Take one thing at a time
We ask ourselves everyday
When will I wake up ok?
Dear You
Muriel Baillie
Dear You,
This is out of control.
I don’t want you here.
I don’t want you there.
I don’t want you anywhere.
Your mere presence irritates me.
Maybe you should go.
It will be better for everyone.
There’s the door.
Love,
Me
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Little Star
Julia Barry
Rise up to the sky where you belong,
Break free of the chalky white plaster that has held you captive for so long,
So far beneath the surface, you long to hear the birds’ song,
You are so different than your company of moss and weeds so you don’t get along,
But why should you? When the light you radiate is so strong,
So rise up to the sky where you belong
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Nicky
Julia Fraser
Nicky’s Morning:
It’s six in the morning. Everyone in my house is tucked in their beds, dreading their alarm clocks going
off, but I lay silently in my bed. I hear my dad say that he was going to have a tough day at work today, so
I’ll let him sleep a little more before I am ready to begin my day. Plus, Julia is going to have to wake up
for school soon. I can hear my mom getting out of bed and trying to creep quietly down the creaky stairs.
I count to sixty in my head and finally decide it’s time to get up. My dad meets me at my bedroom door
and I take a shower and get ready for school. Julia walks by me half asleep but manages to say, “Good
morning, Nicky”. I go to say it back to her, but I cannot form the words. In my head I can hear it perfectly, but when I go to say it out loud, nothing. All she hears is a monkey noise coming out of my mouth
and she laughs. When I go downstairs I greet my mother with a hug, because I may be twenty-four, but
the way I see it is, you are never too old to hug your mother. She hands me my communication book and
asks me what I want for breakfast. Of course, I turn to the pancakes picture.
Oliver’s Morning:
I jump up at the sound of my food hitting my bowl and scurry down the stairs. Nicky, my brother, is already sitting at the table eating his breakfast. Pancakes, my favorite! Lucky for me he’s a messy eater, so
he always drops food on the floor. I feel bad when my mom always has to clean, so I just take care of it
before she sees the mess. I also have to hurry because she said I was going to get sick if I ate that kind of
food, but I feel fine! Oh, Julia’s up, too! I better go say good morning to her! I start jumping on her and
she screams, “Oliver! Get down! No jumping!” She never wants to play with me in the morning. Nicky
always wants to play though, so when he’s finished eating we go into the other room and he plays fetch
with me. Mom said that they used to have another dog named Noah who used to be Nicky’s best friend.
He always was patient with him and never left his side. I never really understood why he had to be patient
with him, but I’ve noticed that Nicky is different than my brother Adam. I always hear my parents telling
people that he has autism or something, whatever that means. He can’t talk though, which sometimes
makes it difficult to know what he is trying to say for the rest of my family, but I have this thing called
“dog intuition.” I can understand what he is saying when he can’t actually get words out. It doesn’t bother
me though. I just hate when I see my family upset about it.
Julia’s Morning:
Whenever I go downstairs in the morning, Nicky is eating a gourmet meal and my mom hands me a
granola bar. I sit down at the table with him and watch him enjoy every bite of his chocolate chip pancakes. He grabs his book and flips vigorously to the page with the horses. It’s Tuesday, so that means he’s
going to Ironstone Farms today with his program to ride horses. Ever since he was little, Nicky has loved
horses. He can even make a horse noise. He continues to rapidly point at the picture and makes the
monkey noise to make sure I am paying attention to him. I make small talk with him and ask him if he’s
going horseback riding today and ask him what other things he has planned for the day. I sit there looking into his big blue eyes, half hoping that he will spontaneously start shouting answers at me, but then I
get back to reality. I watch him as he tries so hard to form the words, but nothing comes out besides,
“Mommy!” That’s always his go to. Whenever he doesn’t know what to say, he just screams that. Usually,
people think he is referring to them as “Mommy,” because they don’t understand that he has a very limited vocabulary. That’s what makes having a brother with autism so difficult; not many people understand, so they are quick to judge. I constantly find myself trying to protect him, because I don’t understand how people can judge him. He is so innocent and would never hurt a fly. I snap back to reality and
watch him finish up his breakfast. I grab my keys and get ready to leave for school. I tell him to have a
good day and to tell Tonka (the horse he rides) that I say, “hello,” and he giggles. As we walk towards my
front door, I hear him make the monkey noise and I can’t help but smile.
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You Can’t Move Mountains
Julia Barry
You can’t move mountains,
But you can climb trees,
You’re only a piece of gravel,
Hidden in the big, wide sea
Merely a weed,
Lying within the umbrage of an old oak,
You’re a splash of water,
Not nearly big enough to soak,
But without you, who would climb the trees?
Their only purpose being to sway in the breeze,
The sea wouldn’t be complete without you,
It wouldn’t be nearly as blue,
Though you are a weed, your flower holds the wishes of many a child,
Without you they would lack a smile,
You are enough, and you belong,
So just stay strong
The Current
Sam Calias
Time isn’t a road or a fabric, or even a consistent thread.
It’s a wave, unpredictable, beautiful, inspirational, and
devastating. Once it crashes, it’s gone and we can never
get it back. There will always be another one, forever, but
never that same one again. We can never hold it in our
hands or even truly remember it. We cling to our memories, so-called imprints of time, like our life-lines. We
recall time as we desire it to have been and, soon, that
powerful wave wipes them out entirely.
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Forming Into Society
Margaux Munick
Forming into society
Of what each and everyone has to be
People say our generation is strange or different
But, we are us, our own generation or form
The things we do make us, our own
Proving to society that, we fit
Like puzzle pieces of our own
Our lives hating and disgusting with technology
Hiding behind it all
This is our generation
Who we are…
Our Generation
Ben Pantazi
First was the 90’s
Music videos and MTV
Next 2000 video games were in their early stages
People began to find themselves as we aged
Groups formed
People changed
Big things hit
Heelys..
Nintendo…
Microsoft….
What’s that, a cellphone?
Now dinner is quiet
As we all are buried in our phones
Even the parents who could not understand our constant texting
Now sit typing away at Sunday dinner
What is happening?
Only the next generation will know
Us we all have children
And teach them all we know
Only the future will tell tunes a lot of time to go.
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Is There Going to be a Breakthrough
Erin Fennessy
Is there going to be a breakthrough
Or a breakdown
Will all these technological advances proceed to make the next big step forward for our time?
Flattering the pages of every new history textbook?
Only to still be read about a thousand years from now?
Or will the world be gone by then?
Will all this technological nonsense lead to humankind’s breaking point?
Some say we’re bettering our own lives
But are we really just ruining them?
When is the last time you wrote a letter?
Or washed a dish by hand?
Or heck! Even used the landline!
People say someday robots will be a common household item
But I say, they already are
Because we have become the robots
When we don’t think for ourselves any longer, that’s when you know you are the robot
When some other force controls your thinking, that’s when you know you’ve became the robot
When technology controls your life, that’s when you know you’re almost no longer human
When you stop relying on your brain because you have a little handheld machine called a calculator
Or how about when you decide you have to take down a photo because it doesn’t get enough likes
What will this mean for us going forward?
Will we just continue on this path of technological reliance?
Or will their be a turn around,
A reverse to try to repair the damage already done to society?
Or will this way of living just become the norm?
If that is true, and we do continue on this way,
I can only imagine what future generations will be like…
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Selfies
A Good Dog
Tim Connelly
A good dog never dies, she always stays, she walked beside me on summer days,
and nudged my hand until I’d play,
My best friend since I was five, my dog Libby will never die.
This is My Selfie
Dan Catalano
This is my selfie.
There are many other selfies like it, but this one is mine.
My selfie, without me, is useless.
Without my selfie, nobody would know how dope my hair looks today.
I must receive more likes than my friends on Instagram.
My selfie and I know what counts in this social network is not the number of
Pictures we take, the filters we put on them, nor the selfies of others.
We know that it is the likes that count, and we will get likes.
If we do not get at least ten likes, my selfie will be taken down.
So be it, until the flash runs out, or until the phone battery dies,
I will take my selfie.
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It’s Time to Cut Loose
Max Murphy
It’s time to cut loose
Cowboy hat? Toothpick? Flannel? Overalls? Check, check, check, and check.
Speaking in a Southern accent to get into character,
And last minute review of songs, dances, and lines.
I hear the cheering of the full house,
The nerves start to flow,
But Mama says, “You can’t back down”
I am Willard Hewitt.
They Make Me Laugh
Alissa Galligani
They make me laugh.
They make me smile.
We will convulse with laughter with just a word or a look.
We will go to battle for each other in a heartbeat,
And we will be sure to put that kid back in his place when he says something out of line.
I know your secrets and you know mine;
You know my fears and I know yours.
Late nights and long days,
Too much time together, yet it’s never enough.
Too many memories that can never be recapped, recorded, or replayed.
The whole is crazier than the sum of its parts.
DNA doesn’t make a family- love does.
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Skateboarding
Jay Garcia
I anxiously grip my board as I head down the stairs and through the door. I can already feel the
grip tape drying up my fingers, so I adjust my grip on the board. Once I’m outside I can’t even wait till
I’m in the street, I immediately hop on my board in one very swift motion. My red Bones Swiss bearings
along with my Orangatang wheels allow for an almost frictionless ride, as if I were gliding on concrete.
Kick, push, kick, push, coast. Nothing on my mind, just the wind blowing against my face. Carving and
weaving through traffic, making sure I don’t get hit, and there isn’t anything in my way that can trip me
up. Wheel bite is a killer. The cruiser I put together looks quite odd, as I took my Real board with Grizzly Grip and threw on my wide set of trucks along with big longboard wheels. Looks almost like a monster truck skateboard.
Shoes
Dylan Dalbeck
Comfy on my feet
Shining in the street
Separate my feet from concrete
Put them on before the track meet
Polished and laced tight
Before I set out through the night
They keep my feet clean and dry
I try to buy Jordan’s to look fly
When I’m on the court and jump so high
I feel like I can touch the sky
Some say it’s the shoes
You can’t lose
A champion of the game
Trying to obtain fame
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Our Generation
Cassandra Souza
Out for the whole night
Using headphones to hear our music
ScRolls through Twitter
Girls hate one another
Everyone is wild and crazy
Never wanting to age
Everyone gets caught eventually
Rarely classy
Always partying
Texting 24/7
Initiating fights
Overly tired
Not everyone is the same
The Hypocritical Poet
Shane Sullivan
Thinking of the writing and rhymes,
Consuming their thoughts all of the time.
Over analyzing everything before your eyes,
Just cross your T’s and dot your I’s.
From a dream you had, to the neighbor next door,
People use whatever they can just to add more.
Some overcome obstacles or deal with a death,
These are so overused, can we give it a rest?
The trick is to think outside the box,
But some have lost the key to their locks.
To stand out from a crowd so original, so plain,
One must write so appalling and vain.
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If the Sky Is Blue at All
Meghan Bodette
We met on a Tuesday.
She was sitting in line at the DMV and crying, and my first thought was that no one individual had the right to
make everyone else more miserable on average. There’s mean and there’s true and there’s what kind of person
you are in how defined you think the line is between them, and for me it was always clear.
In middle school they called that a personality failing. I saw it as another thing that made me better than that idea
of “them,” and they called the thought of there being a distinct “them” a personality failing too, and I looked them
straight in the face and told them that reason was never a failing.
This was not an enjoyable place. She was enjoying it less than the rest of us were. She was making it worse. Reason.
But she had blue streaks in her hair and faded Sharpie tattoos and eyes that looked sad for the world, and on her
scale “me” and “them” were too small to be significant.
She was sitting in line at the DMV and crying, and I sat down and asked why.
“I don’t know you.” Her voice was hard.
“You go to West Memorial, don’t you?”
She looked up at me and down at her short-hemmed plaid skirt. “How?. . . yeah.”
“Same.”
“What’s it matter?”
I moved back an inch. “It makes me. . . not some random person, I guess?”
“Everyone’s some random person until someone else says they’re not. You don’t decide that.” We were quiet for a
while. There was a vending machine humming in the corner and I glanced over.
“I like Sour Patch,” she said.
“Cool.”
I put a dollar in and it spat it out, found a crisper one, same thing, and she was standing next to me, digging
through her pockets.
“Here.”
Three quarters, two dimes, and a brown-stained nickel fell in my hand. I bit my lip and smiled.
When you go into a situation with equally probable outcomes, there’s the same chance each time you’ll get either
one. She could have done that, she could have not; it was a coin-flip.
It was random.
Reason.
I reached in, took the bag, brought it back to the hard plastic bench.
“I can never open these,” I said, struggling with the wrapper.
“That’s nice.”
The thin plastic tore and I took a few pieces. I gave her the green, kept the red and orange.
“Most people don’t like the green ones.”
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I could feel my face flush. “So, I’m assuming. . .”
“They’re my favorite.”
“That’s good.”
I licked the sour crystals off my fingers. She still looked like she was about to burst into tears.
“So are you…ok?”
Nothing, and she reached for the bag again. They called a number, another person moved up in line, the dim fluorescent bulbs flickered overhead
“You see that? “She asked.
“What?”
“This.” She waved at the room.
“Yeah.”
“This if life. The lines, the numbers, the people-everything. You aren’t real in here.”
It was an ordered system. To be honest, I didn’t mind it.
“No one likes the DMV.”
“Its not like that. The place. . . it’s a metaphor for everywhere else, it could be anywhere.”
“Then why are you. . .“
“I don’t know. It wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway.”
“Not everything has to be meaningful.” The world wouldn’t work if we only did what we thought was meaningful.
College applications, grades, life—those don’t run on meaning.
“There's a reason I said to you.”
“I'm trying to make this better.”
“Look at me right now and say that again”
And I did.
And she had blue streaks in her hair and faded Sharpie tattoos and eyes that looked sad for the world, and maybe
it was because she saw meaning where it should have been, not where it wasn’t.
If you have no way of proving that something exists, you can say it doesn’t. If someone else can, they can say it
does. There's no way of knowing we all see the same things the same way, if the blue I see in the sky is the same as
the blue anyone else sees, or if the sky is blue at all.
Reason.
Or maybe the precise lack of it, and maybe that was called for.
I closed my eyes, shook my head, thought, I can’t. They called the next number.
I looked down at the ticket and ripped it in half.
“Sorry,” I said, and took a pen from the floor, scrawled nine digits on the scrap, “and this is mine, and I’m sorry,
and if you ever want to talk again. . . here.”
She nodded, took the paper, and I went up to the desk.
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The Day After
Sam Calias
It was an ordinary morning,
the house swelled with noise,
as we walked through our ordinary lives.
A sound like a thousand shattering windows
Deflates the house of all sound,
filling it with a heavy pounding silence.
The minutes flash by in a blur
of adrenaline and fear.
The terrifying stillness splintered by the screech of sirens.
It was never an ordinary day.
The house remained deathly still,
as we fumbled through the rest of our lives.
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America
Krystle Boyajian
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Futurology, or “Dude, Where’s My Flying Car?”
Michael Gannon
People often complain, when discussing the future, of the lack of flying cars. They point to
works like The Jetsons and Back to the Future and say, “Where’s my flying car? They promised me that by now I would be able to get around that insufferable morning commute by flying
into work.”
There are innumerable problems with this line of thought. For one thing, the technology to
achieve flight existed before the works they cited were even made. The fact that the vehicles in
those and other works look like cars is a result of aesthetic design’s supremacy over practical
concerns in a work of fiction. To create a comfortable environment in a flying vehicle, even
something like first class airplane seating, which is about comparable to the seating in a modern
car, requires a system of impractical initial expense and constant further charges from fuel; a
modern commercial airplane, or perhaps, with even more closeness to a car and more expense, a private jet. These solutions, answers to the question, these “flying cars” do in fact exist,
but they are extravagantly expensive by modern middle class standards. Furthermore, they
demonstrate the second and even greater problem with the flying car question, namely that flying cars are a logistical nightmare.
Getting any flying vehicle in the air requires huge amounts of planning and organization. Running a helicopter pad is bad enough, but helicopters don’t even meet science fiction’s flying car
standards, and the private jet, which actually does, is disgustingly worse. Air traffic control systems are under enough stress as it is without every car on the road now flitting around the sky,
and that assumes another huge issue with flying cars common in science fiction; competent pilots. Ever heard of distracted driving? Imagine that with a hundred thousand little jet powered
boxes of metal flying at 30,000 feet. And of course there is the other major logistical problem
with the flying car; its just stupid to use in most transport situations. If I wanted to get from Boston to London in a reasonable amount of time, of course I would take my theoretical “flying
car” private jet. But to get from Boston to Austin? First of all, I’d need an airfield on the Austin
end. Good luck funding that. And even if I used a helicopter, even if I used the magically perfect flying car from traditional fiction, a botched parking job could be disastrous. And if everyone was doing it? It would take hours before everyone could get off campus safely, and only a
few days before there was a terrible accident anyway. Putting a person behind the wheel of a car
is barely safe as it is. Putting them in a personal jet would be so dangerous and impractical it
would be unethical and perhaps outright immoral.
The flying car is, ultimately, a rather silly idea. Most sane people only ask the question in jest.
Yet it raises an important point about nothing less than the nature of technology, human ingenuity, and the progress of civilization; “Which of those things that we wish to do can we, by
means of our own intelligence and hard work, make reality? How much of what we want to do
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can we do?” The want, in the case of the flying car, is rather the central point, for if one really
delves into the issue, one realizes the goal is not for a person to fly at all, but to get somewhere
quickly, safely, and efficiently. The preceding discussion does not, thus, declare the goal impossible, but in fact helps it along by ruling out several popular aviation related theories on the issue.
What instead is the solution? Is it in faster cars, intercity subways, automation? At the moment, we
don’t know, but what is important is that we can find out. We can, and we will keep trying to answer the question. Because that is what the future is all about; trying to shape the world to make it a
better place to be. Make life easier, make it more fun, more productive, and more meaningful. We
live in a world where all we seem to have is ourselves, our needs, our wants, our surroundings,
each other, and the constant threat of the oncoming future, and the best thing that can be done
with these elements, the solution to the puzzle, seems to be to work by ourselves and with others to
apply our collective intellects and abilities to the world around us to meet our needs, fulfill our
wants, help each other, and prepare for any threat or serendipitous boon that may come from that
enigmatic, omnipresent force, that mysterious future standing always before us.
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Deep Common Sense
Ben Pompilus
It gets intense, once you smell the incense and you feel repentance, I’m not dense, I
make sense.
Hence, the fact that love never hates, but hate is in love, cause hate loves to hate.
Example, jealousy and envy are identical twins and once combined together they’re one
of the main causes of sin.
In fact, I attract, then subtract the act of regret, intact with hate and money, just don’t
send me, cause the dollar bill is always green like it’s filled with envy.
Pause, cause time has got me suffering like a child getting impatient while a YouTube
video is buffering.
I mean, he seem ticked cause he missed the opportunity to entertain his flock.
He sounded ticked, the way he talked, you would’ve thought he was a clock.
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The Bronze Men
Sam Calias
The bronze men weep
with frustration.
The weight of their troubles
forcing them down.
The bronze men stand
in defeat.
Their subdued souls
immortalized in their dark eyes.
The bronze men cower
from shame.
Hiding their dirty faces
for two hundred years.
The bronze men remain
Forever.
Will they overcome the weight?
Never.
Australia Dancing
Mike Nigro
I hear Australia dancing, the steps
Pounding on the ground, each step makes
A different sound.
I hear Australia moving to the beat,
Dancing as they jump up and down,
The steps making more sounds.
I hear the music blasting, the Australians singing along, making
Even more sound.
Their voices clear as day as they sing
And dance the night away.
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With a Hat on Her Head
Ashlyn DeRoche
With a hat on her head and a coat on she is ready to leave
Staring back at the people behind
Holding her booklet with all her information
She dreams of what life will be like.
Her big fur coat and green dress
Shows she will not be a mess.
A brave young woman she looks to be
Smiling now since she is ready to leave.
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