No Status Quo!

"I hate a Roman named Status Quo!" he said to me, "Stuff your eyes with wonder," he said, "live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away."
-Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

I have never been one to follow the crowd or to just do something because everyone else is. Perhaps that has made me devoid of certain experiences. Perhaps that has caused me to be viewed as a little strange. (That girl likes the cold weather? Why is she living here in the humidity of Florida? Weird, they think.) I can just read other people's thoughts sometimes when I talk about my love for books and reading. I see the looks people give me when I say I love to wear layers and scarves. These Floridians look at their flip flops and shorts and tell me I am crazy.
Maybe I am.
Or maybe I know a little bit of what fantastic wonder there is out in there in the world. In other places.  Perhaps I have had a small taste of that which is different, and I love it. And I want more of it.

Same with my love of books and learning. I've had a taste of it and I want more of it. This was exactly the fear that drove the futuristic world (which turns out to be our present day) in Fahrenheit 451 to ban books. The government decided that the best thing for everyone is for their decisions to be made for them, by the government. They have huge wall-sized TVs and countless reality shows (sound familiar?) that everyone watches all day, and the characters in the shows become their 'family'. The only thing they are allowed to read is their scripts for these shows. People drive 90-100 mph (remember, this was written in 1950) and don't slow down to notice the grass or the flowers. They made billboard signs 200 feet across so when people drive 100 mph they can read them. When the main character, Montag, starts noticing the little things, he tells his wife that there is dew on the grass if you look closely, and she thinks he has gone crazy.

Such an interesting perspective of our world about this "futuristic" day Ray Bradbury writes about. Sadly, many aspects of his predictions are present today. The norms and values have shifted since the 1950s and those of us not born in that era don't really know how strange this day has become in many ways.