Eggs vs. The System
This week in class, we read Haruki Murakami’s acceptance speech for the Jerusalem prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. In Israel during 2009, many pro-Palestinian groups protested for him to not accept this award.
In his acceptance speech, Murakami uses a metaphor to describe how humans make up “The System” that is supposed to protect us but is harming us instead. When reading this excerpt for the first time, I was extremely confused as to why he was mentioning eggs and walls. Once he began explaining his metaphor, I was stopped in my tracks when he exposed the truth of “The System” that he was describing. My thinking was challenged when he stated that this “wall” is supposed to make us feel safe, but it is exploiting and killing us. I was delighted on how he ended his excerpt, encouraging the audience to fight back together against “The System” because it did not make us — we made it.
