Twin Oaks is it a Utopia or Sham???

Twins Oaks is a community in Virginia that is considered a utopia because of how the community lives by their own set of rules. Their rules have similarities to what we picture as the perfect world. In Twin Oaks, you don’t see crime because the existence of poverty has been eliminated. “That’s great!” you say, “No poverty, pack your bags we’re going to Virginia”. Hold the phone you, eager optimist. Let me tell you about some more of the positives and then the not so positive.

Twin Oaks, Virginia

So, let’s get through the positives, Twin Oaks has a government that rotates consistently so the likelihood of a politician being corrupt is lowered. Twin Oaks has a stable economy because they are not completely reliant on the United States economy. Also, economically the residents end up pooling some of their money for the betterment of the community. The community is very sexually open minded, what I mean is they are accepting of LGBTQ members and don’t reject their sexuality. The community also pools its resources, so much so that borrowing something from someone else, is popular. The community has a low carbon footprint because they are reliant on crops and their farms.

 I would want to live in a place like this, having a stable economy and government that isn’t totally fucked. It would be a nice change especially now with our new President, Donald Trump. (damn you, electoral college! you failed us again) But there is one thing that keeps me from packing my bags and going to Twin Oaks, Virginia. That thing is a waitlist. Your probably saying “just sign up and be patient like the rest of us”. But I will not support the idea of a waitlist.

It’s not the waitlist, it’s what the waitlist does, that makes me question Twin Oaks as a utopia. Twins Oaks is not open, it closed off. That waitlist is a barrier, it not a physical wall like the one our president campaigned on. But it is a divide, Twin Oaks is not accepting of everyone. They are not accessible to the public. This is a fundamental problem for me as the first American born child of two immigrant parents. Technically Twin Oaks has closed borders, that means they aren’t accepting of people who want to get away from the problems outside of Twin Oaks. They have a waitlist that they use to sort of check people as well as get people accustomed to their culture. And while this doesn’t sound bad, if we were to magnify this behavior into a global scale, it would cause chaos. (hint, hint…Dystopia?)

US-Mexico Border

So now your saying, “Well, Twin Oaks isn’t the world”, and your right but a utopia to me is a perfect place, and I would even say a perfect world. Just because a small community exists and is preferable doesn’t mean that it’s perfect. Perfection means to have no flaws, and to do that Twin Oaks would need to eliminate the flaws around them as well. Here’s an example that might make what I’m trying to say more clear.

Let’s say there was a perfect human, someone who was at the peak of human existence; physically, mentally, and morally. But this human witnessed massacres achieving perfection, they could have fixed these massacres but didn’t because it would mean to lessen themselves from perfection. Would this person still be considered perfect? I’d say no, because they could have helped people but chose to do nothing. So morally they didn’t take an action to better the environment around them. This means that morally this person was not perfect.

I recently watched Children of Men, a film based in a world that has collapsed due to infertility, the only stable country is Britain. The main plot focuses on the journey of a former political activist that transports the mother of the first baby born in 18 years. But I’m not going to focus on the main plot but one of the side stories. Early I said the world collapsed and that Britain was the only stable country, the story I’m looking at is how Britain in this world treats people from other parts of the globe (i.e immigrants). They take a very strict approach to immigration, they hunt down immigrants like the Nazi’s hunted the Jewish. After caught immigrants get sent to a refugee camp. The conditions are poor and death and famine run rampant. You might be asking why this is included in the film, well the first mother is an immigrant. The British would have hunted her down.  Britain’s actions causes an uprising by the end of the movie between the immigrants and the government.

Obviously, this is not a utopia, but what is interesting is that Britain in this dystopian world is essentially doing the same thing twin oaks is doing with their waitlist. Sure, Twin Oaks is not hunting immigrants and treating them as scum. But what they are doing is closing off stability, from the rest of the world.

This to me is what makes Twin Oaks a closed off hippie-like commune, not a utopia.

P.S Watch Children of Men, it’s great film especially now with all the shit happening in our government. You can watch it on HBO Go/Now.

Andre M. 852 Words

Resources Used

Children of Men. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron, performances by Clive Owen, Julianne Moore,             Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Charlie Hunnam, Universal Pictures, 2006.

Robertson, Gary. "A Cultivated Community." Richmond Magazine,                       http://richmondmagazine.com/news/a-cultivated-community-06-18-2013/. Accessed 26 February 2017.

“Children of Men: Don't Ignore The Background.” YouTube, uploaded by Nerdwriter1, 9 September 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-woNlmVcdjc.