"Barbie-Q" from the Barbie's Perspective

    The little girls liked to play with us. You are in a striped swimsuit, stilettos, sunglasses, and gold hooped earrings, with a slicked back ponytail hairdo. Me in a vibrant red swimsuit, stilettos, and pearl earrings, with bubble hair that's hardly touched out of fear of ruining it. Each of us has one other outfit, and a black sock dress we share that’s all our family can afford, but to us it doesn’t matter. The black dress has worn over time yet the girls still use it.

    We have our parts, the same roles we’ll play each time they play with us. We are roommates, then you come steal my boyfriend and we fight. Except no one will play Ken. Ken will be invisible because there is no money for a boy doll when the girls could ask for more clothes for us instead at Christmas. We’ll continue playing our parts in this story over and over again until next Sunday.

    The fire burned through the whole warehouse, leaving many other toys damaged due to the smell of smoke and water. The girls will beg and beg for the now cheap Barbies and till the parents say yes and there will be many new additions to our story. The new Barbie’s won’t come in new boxes like we did, but the girls won’t care. The two new outfits will be shared unlike how we used to have our own.

    The new Barbie’s will smell like smoke even after the girls wash them over and over again. The girls will hide the prettiest doll’s foot, Francie Baribe’s MOD’ern cousin in a new “Prom Pinks” outfit. They will rationalize saying you’ll never even notice the foot, unless you lift up the dress, and Francie will believe them. The rest of us will always notice how she has one leg slightly longer than the other due to the melted foot. Yet, the girls will be happy because they will finally fit in owning Bendable Legs Barbie, Midge, Skipper, Tutti, Todd, Scooter, Ricky, Alan, and Ken, because they could finally afford him so he was no longer just that stupid boy doll.

How current events help us to understand "The Machine Stops" by E.M Forster

In “The Machine Stops” by E.M Forster, humans live in The Machine underground due to the air on the “surface” no longer being  breathable. In the story the humans completely rely on The Machine for every aspect of life, and rarely see others face-to-face but communicate instead by video-calls. This is an especially relevant story as just a few years ago due to COVID-19 we were also only communicating by video calls. I believe this has allowed us to understand the story through a different lens as we know how important face-to-face human interactions are for our socety.

    The story also discusses climate change and how humans have brought this world upon themselves. Currently in the world there are many disastrous and devastating severe weathers, like wildfires and hurricanes. Since, in recent years there have been many more natural devastations due to growing climate issues brought on by humans. This makes the story even more relevant as it opens our eyes to possibilities of what our future could look like in the near-ish future. 

This story was originally published in 1909  and since then this story has become more relevant in ways that E.M Forster could have only guessed. The world we are currently living in makes this story seem not so fictional, but as a more realistic possibility of what our future could be if we don’t start to work and act more against climate change.