The Shell of Eggs to Bullets
The acceptance speech by Haruki Murakami talks of the bases of people against the system. The people representing the egg and the System as the high and industry table wall. As one we are brittle and weak, unable to cause much change to a bigger problem “ We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System.” People don’t understand that like the one you don’t do much, but as a society, you can cause revolutions. What I love most about this speech is that he made this speech despite many protests against him accepting this award. I don’t understand why they were against his acceptance, but it might have been because of something controversial. It plays into the idea of how people are often put against each other instead of being United for a cause.
Such as the Black Lives Matter movement. If people did not stand together in order to fight for the cause, nothing would have happened. It would be like a bee fighting against a lion, sure it would cause some harm, but not enough to stop anything. But give it a swarm and the lion has no chance of ever winning. People were only able to cause such change because they stood together, against the system. “To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong — and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others’ souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.”
I think another quote that really stood out to me was the ending line, “The System did not make us: We made The System.” I feel like sometimes people forget that our most prominent problems were created by us. From global warming and world hunger to riots and wars, we have been the cause of all of it. The difference is the people for the problem and against it. The Egg vs. The Wall. The ones who get hurt in the process ( soldiers, citizens, wildlife) and the people who see war as a way to enforce power, to make a definite statement. There are always two sides to a coin, it only matters what side u are on when the final flip is settled. Yet I feel like there is a deeper meaning to the quote as well, you cannot let something objective overpower us who are individuals so different from one another. The system is something that we created and something we can easily take down, only if we stand together as one. The day that we see the system as it is, is the day that we become not brittle shells of eggs, but the shells of bullets.