The Veldt

Whats funny is when I started reading the first line of the story I thought nursery? huh. This short passage from the book The Veldt, was really interesting and I enjoyed reading it. It is mainly about a wealthy family that purchases a house that does almost everything for them. The family is not required to lift a finger, and as George's wife Lydia in the book puts it, "the house is wife and mother and now nursemaid."(10). The house also has a room called the veldt for George's kids Peter and Wendy in which they are able to imagine a place and make it come alive in this one little room. As the chapter goes on George starts to realize that his kids are spoiled and their lives begin to become a sort of fantasy  making them loose touch with reality. He calls is psychologist and he advises him to shut the veldt off. When george shuts it off, he tells his kids that the family will be taking a vacation to get back to daily life.  His kids begin to throw a tantrum. His wife advises him to turn it on for a few minutes for the last time. As he does this, the kids lock their parents in the room and the parents are eaten by a hungry tiger. It is really crazy what these kids did to their parents because they decided to take away the veldt from them. It just goes to show how addicting a piece of technology can be. This can related us kids today. We don't have something so extravagant like the veldt, but our generation cannot live without the various social networks and pieces of technology including Facebook, Twitter, and our iPods. The children in the book grew to love this virtual machine more than their own parents. I feel like something like this would exist in the future, but even though the idea sounds cool, I don't think that it would benefit anyone. Like this poor family, we would begin to loose our purpose in life, and everything that we need to work for would be just handed to us and whats the fun in that? Life is all about going through hardships to come out as a winner and achieve whatever it is that we want. Technology is going a little too far, and this passage is a great example of the repercussions.