I really like going to the grocery
store. Now, it’s probably because I really like food, but for some reason I
just really enjoy going there. In the grocery store everything has a name, or a
label. The store is divided into different sections. There’s the produce
section, the meat section, the grain section, the frozen section, the list goes
on and on. Those sections are then organized based on the foods within them.
Apples are separate from pineapples, pasta is separate from rice, and chicken
is separate from beef. If you delve even deeper there’s even more separation.
Organic from nonorganic, locally grown from internationally imported, and store
brand from non-store brand. Everything in a grocery store has a label, and more
than one really. An apple is “produce,” “fruit,” and could be a “Granny Smith”
or a “Fiji.”
This labeling occurs everywhere you
look. Take Larson’s and Hostetler’s 6th Edition of the thrilling
textbook PreCalculus for example. In
the book you’ll find text reading:
x^2+3x+6=0. Simply put it’s a series of numbers and letters. It’s also
an equation. It’s also a function. If you’re being even more specific,
it’s a quadratic function. Look at Martini’s and Nath’s enthralling 8th
Edition of Fundamentals of Anatomy and
Physiology. They tell us that the
humerus is a bone. It’s sometimes called the funny bone. It’s also categorized
as a long bone. It’s also part of the appendicular skeleton. All these things
have labels.
By the end of Midnight’s Children,
Saleem Sinai has thirty pickled pickle jars. He has categorized his story
into thirty separate sections, and each has its own label: “Alpha and Omega,”
“Mercurochrome,” “Abracadabra,” Altogether these parts make a whole. He says
that every pickle jar contains, the most exalted of possibilities: the
feasibility of the chutnification of history (Rushide 529). His “long-winded
autobiography” is divided into words and pickles, into parts.
Parts make a whole.
Individuals together make a society. Those relationships are remarkably similar
to each other. So what brings these things together? Labels. Labels are everywhere. They’re the
stamp society puts on things or people to make sense or meaning of them. They
can be comforting, as well as feel restraining, but regardless they’re always
there. An individual can never escape his or her membership in society because
those labels ultimately bind individuals to society.
So how can that be? If individuals
make a society are they anything on their own? How can the term individual even
exist if society is always there?
Labels are indefinite and inevitable
and we can’t truly escape society. Those answers are already known. The real
questions are, can we rise to the occasion? Can we choose to be more than just
a label?
