Ruby Slippers

            For most of us, when we are feeling down, tired, and worn-out we just want to go home. Home is our safe haven. We have a sense of immortality when we are safely within the walls of our home. Nothing can get to because we control what we let in the front door. But what is it that drives us back to our homes. What is so bad outside that makes us want to return home?

            The world’s biggest and most dangerous demons are in fact our own selfish desires.  This day in age everyone wants something and they want it now. They will stop at almost nothing to obtain it. In Salman Rushdie’s book titled East, West, there is a short story titled At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers. It is a story about the famous ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz is being auctioned off. Everyone, no matter their status in life, is at the auction just for the slippers. The crowd in made up of such diversity that there is fear that the auction house will lose control. The bidders for the slippers are willing to give up all their fortunes just to win.

            So why are the slippers so valuable to the people? “We believe they can make us invulnerable to witches, reverse metamorphosis, and because they shine like the footwear of the gods.” (pg 92) Presumably they are magical shoes and can make anything happen. They are the answers to all our desires in life. No matter what the problem is, it is believed that by winning the bid for the slippers everything will be solved.  “They promised to take us home.” (pg 93)

            There it is a simple solution to all our problems. All I have to do is outbid everyone else and I will achieve all my desires. It doesn’t matter if I crush everyone else’s dreams in order to get mine. Once I have the ruby slippers all my problems will be solved. Well at least that is what these bidders believe. But how can that be? Are the ruby slippers the only chance I have at happiness? If I don’t win the final bid I will be lost forever. “Our own survival become – yes! – fictions.” (pg 102) This isn’t real; the ruby slippers aren’t the answers to all my problems. How can acquire a object solve my problems or fix my life. There has to a more practical way.

            “I drop out of the bidding, go home, and fall asleep. When I awake I feel refreshed, and free.” (pg 102) The answer is not in the ruby slippers, or whatever else will be at auction the next night. I am the answer to my problems. Recognizing that in order to fix the problem it must start from within. I simply go home, to my safe haven, to recoup from my own demons of desire. I don’t need to posses magical objects; those objects are most likely the root of my evil desires. I have the true power to return home, no matter where or what “home” is to me. I am my own magical ruby slippers.