Knowing Sarah Connor

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

It was two years before my father was born that a few suffragettes got other women in Canada the vote. At the time it was hoped that women, on becoming part of democracy, might be a civilizing influence for world peace. But I guess there are not enough people like Sarah. 

Sean Crawford, excerpt from below

Hello Reader,

Remember Sarah?

In the wake of the third Terminator movie—the others don't count; it has sure been a long time since T2—I decided to re-run a post by my idealistic younger self from ten years ago.

But first:
Here's what full-time writer and former journalist John Scalzi said on his blog, Whatever, for November 3, 2019:

As I walked out of the film last night I posted a five word recommendation of this film: “It gets Sarah Connor right.” This actually matters because despite the name of films, the “Terminator” films are about Sarah Connor, and the arc of her life dealing with the terrible fate that life has dealt her: Victim to fighter to avenger. Sarah Connor is realistically (within the context of these films) damaged by this fate of hers; particularly in this film she’s a PTSD wreck. And, well, she would be, wouldn’t she. It’s important that the Terminator films show her this way. It’s for better or worse the grounding the films need to make every other absurd thing that happens in them function on the level of plausibility.

My old blog essay:
Having a hatred for war and a fondness for feminists, I have a soft spot for the tormented Sarah Connor in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah is a single mother who knows that an atomic war is coming but instead of being paralyzed by her knowledge of Judgment Day she is determined to do whatever she can. One might assume that T2 is violent, (yes) action-filled (yes) and ... nonfeminist. (no) No, it is a moral movie: To see Sarah is to glimpse feminism. 

 For several years I was a nonvoting member of the University of Calgary Women's Collective and Resource Center. One of the other males at the center did that thing where a man dresses in spongy body armor head to toe, (cap-a-pie) and then the women are encouraged to hit him as hard as they can. The results may go beyond learning literal self-defense: On a metafilter web site a woman describes how from such practice she swiftly became empowered to react differently in so many aspects of her life. Feminists believe in empowerment.

 Were I to hit a man in such armor, my first blow would likely be at half strength, but then my next blow would probably land at mostly full strength. For a number of women, though, blow after blow is delivered at only a teeny fraction of what they are capable of: such is the power of social conditioning. Call it “learned helplessness.” In all fairness, those same women would strike desperately hard if their child was being threatened. I respect Sarah Connor for her self empowerment to strike hard: Not only does she learn to use various military weapons but even after she has a life sentence to the insane asylum-prison, even when her life is over —or at least into limbo— she is determined to stay as physically fit as she can. In that hopeless jail, if she has nice muscles, it has nothing to do with attracting men—she is trying to Be Ready. 

Of course feminists can attract boyfriends and have families and worry about their children. Sarah’s tribulations are during the cold war, when all children, worldwide, are at risk. Some day our grandchildren may be baffled at how we could learn to live with the horror of missile silos, but we did, the same way we could ignore how women didn’t have equal rights: Humans are good at denial. During those dread times we could choose to try our best to stave off Armageddon, or we could be passive.

In those strange days when most people would wimp out, be overwhelmed, throw up their hands in defeat...
if I felt like Crazy Eddie who, after being condemned by the king to death, got the king to commute his death sentence "for one year" so that he could "teach the king's horse to sing..."
 then, in those trying times, I could always depend on the Women's Movement to keep up with me, to keep slogging away at my side. Feminists believe in peace.

 When a man confronted Eddie for being crazy enough to think a horse could ever sing, Eddie answered gaily, "A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might learn to sing."

As a boy I learned the lyrics to a spiritual: "...Joshua fit (fought) the battle of Jericho, and the wall come a-tumbling down." During those years when I was encouraging people to "hold on," to "never give up," because there might be a miracle, I never imagined that one day a horse over in Berlin would sing. Sarah never gives up. She can't: She can't forget the vision of herself in a gingham dress, which Sarah could never wear, in a park with her children, whom Sarah could never know. Who can forget seeing her other self and the children in that searing wind of death? Not Sarah. She won’t dial down her consciousness. Feminists are willing to know things.

 Given her obsessed lifestyle, with no chance to attend a weekly women’s consciousness raising group, it is unlikely Sarah would stop to think long enough to call herself a feminist. But she acts like one. Sarah is barren of sisterhood yet in her lonely way, she finds a philosophy.

In T2 she angrily confronts a scientist, Dr. Dyson, who will soon be largely responsible for triggering our Day of Judgment. Losing her temper she yells that people like him kill because they cannot create life, cannot feel a child growing. In the book version by Randall Frakes she goes on to point out that men's version of creating is to give their name to the guns that they create. Meanwhile, the Calgary Police Service has adopted a new service pistol and wouldn't you know, it is named after Mr. Glock.

 In my young adulthood I watched as a few "woman's libbers" got other women the freedom to have jobs as notary publics and judges, doctors and police officers. We take this for granted now, but not then. It was two years before my father was born that a few suffragettes got other women the vote. At the time it was hoped that women, on becoming part of democracy, might be a civilizing influence for world peace. But I guess there are not enough people like Sarah. 

 My own mother believed in peace, but I can't deny there are other cultures, equal to ours in the sight of Allah, but not the same as ours: There are places where mothers teach their children to hold on to a double standard for women, and for foreigners, to hold fast to their hatred, and, in the end, to value hatred over peace. “Oh well,” says Eddie and I, “at least in my father's lifetime no two democracies have ever declared war on each other, so perhaps as democracy spreads...?”

Democracy is where two heads are better than one. Sarah, unfortunately, has little access to the democratic give and take of free speech. Bereft of a circle of empowering sisters she is alone with her knowledge of the coming horror...

 Alone, Sarah almost destroys her soul but then she suffers a child to be her call unto sanity. As young John says to someone else, "Don't you get it? Haven't you learned anything? You can't go around killing people." And Sarah cries.

 Feminism, being for equality, includes men too. As my dictionary says, it means “political and social and economic equality to men.” I am picturing, from just before "women's liberation," a “power to the people” 1960’s male activist: As he feels confident and equal, as he feels truly empowered, then he will no longer need the silly crutch of having women make the coffee.

A feminist visiting Sarah's asylum would ask if the patients, men and women, are being empowered to be all they can be, by growing as much as they can, by making as many decisions as they can. Democracy in America, as the French observer De Tocqueville once explained in his 1835 classic, is where a free people make little decisions, often, so they will grow fit for making big decisions, occasionally, at the voting booth. Perhaps democracy, then, is a prerequisite for people to be motivated to even care to know what growth is, let alone care, Allah willing, for the growth of women.

 When I first saw Sarah she was a simple girl. An emissary from the future warned her: She was going to find strength she never knew she had, grow in ways she never thought possible. And grow she did. 

 Sarah reminds me of my own world. It wasn't very long ago that editors would not publish Andrew Vasche's mysteries about an ex-con, Burke, who fights child pornography rings, because nobody could believe such rings of men and women existed. Now we believe. Feminists, at first feeling alone, and being told they were crazy, have helped us to know that such horror exists.

If Judgment Day is a moral movie then it must have karma. It's only right that a shrink who messed with Sarah's mind has his own mind blown, such is the shrink’s karma, but what of Doctor Dyson? How could a husband and father have a rendezvous with death? Easy: Because of Cyberdine Industries.

 That's where a suspended pteradactal alludes to nuclear winter, where their secret vault requires two keys, turned simultaneously, to open up. When I was a child during the cold war hearing the sad air raid sirens being tested, “sorrrrrryy,” we all knew that if the man in Washington ever “pressed the button” it took two keys to empty out the silos. In that vault at Cyberdine was the “button." There rested the preposterous robot hand and the impossibly advanced chip. 

Dyson saw. He was a scientist and citizen who knew that science and democracy requires questions and transparency, knowing that if an invention requiring a previous series of steps suddenly appears, then either the steps have been kept secret or the device has been stolen; he was a scholar who knew how to search the science literature and scrutinize the newspaper files, those files which would have led him to Sarah Connor's story; he was a man of planet Earth who knew we all must be alert to question strange new paths of death, from factories putting mercury down pipes into the sushi of Tokyo bay, to pesticide sprays killing the higher animals, to fluorocarbons rising up to blast the ozone; … and so when Dyson was ordered, "don't ask!" and when he agreed not to question that button in the vault, when he passed along those orders, when he silenced an idealistic young long haired scientist, then, like a good Muslim German, he failed in his duty as a scientist, citizen, scholar and moral human being. Dyson failed.

 "The future is not set," said the emissary to Sarah Connor. "There is no fate but what we make." I agree. I believe devoutly, “Our greatest enemy is despair.”

 So hurray for Sarah! For me it is almost worth the price of admission just to see, for one second, my hero do a victory hop and skip in the prison hallway. In that second I see a human being go from victim to survivor, from shuffling peasant to purposeful citizen. In that moment I see our lady of holy fire: Sarah will always create her own empowerment.

Sean Crawford
Still traveling through time,

at one second per second,
November
Calgary
2019

footnotes:

~For more on karma and morality, see my essay Morality, Boys and Hollywood, originally entitled Terminators and Boys, of July 2013.

~I still get homesick reading the pre-feminist 1940's Martian Chronicles. We had thought the future was set, that we were fated to more gadgets but no social change.

~Roll call:  Alexander Kalishnikov, (AK-47), Heckler and Koch, (HK33), Mills bombs, (British grenades) Maxim, Vickers, Samual Colt, Henry Derringer, Gatling, Winchester, Browning,  Beretta, Martini-Henry (Kipling's troops) Lee-Enfield (my dad's rife) Ross (the infamous dysfunctional rifle) Gerber (the commando knife) ... and others too, down a long line.

~The biggest surprise ovation I will ever receive was at a weekly (for ten weeks) peace meeting.

The meetings were so big that a huge lecture theater proved inadequate for the first meeting; (people were sitting in the aisles) we subsequently had to use a music recital hall. Most of us were from off campus.

After someone complained about the futility of declaring the campus a "nuclear free zone" I said that yesterday I felt the same, but here, today, I was trying to be positive, for such declarations are not an end but a means to an end, a way of moving us further along the road to a solution that we cannot conceive of yet. 

Without mentioning Crazy Eddie I reminded them of other unpredictable miracles such as Alcoholics Anonymous and stopping the White (A-bomb) Train, miracles that offered a way out from a hopeless terminal condition.

I said building peace is like everyone working together on a giant mural while you can only see the one little leaf that you are painting so painstakingly. You don't just quit. Instead you have a blurred vision of this big world that we are all working towards... And then, starting from off on the right, everyone in the hall applauded long and loud in solidarity.

Losing Innocence, With Martians

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got innocence in everyday life?

Short-Essay

Quotation

Long-Poem

Short-Essay

A wit once said America was the only nation that could keep losing its innocence, and then finding it again. Even after Vietnam, America still rebounded, but was never, I think, quite the same. George Orwell noted that his generation, which came of age at the end of World War I, was rebellious, but they never knew why. Only years later did Orwell realize it was due to the loss of innocence after the great war.

His generation must have been shocked to learn the “establishment” did not care about them: At least, did not care enough to become competent and develop common sense. During the terrible incompetence of the Second World War, working in London during the blitz, Orwell would keenly scrutinize the upper class. His essay begins, “As I write this, highly civilized men are flying overhead trying to kill me…” 

During the First World War, everyone thought the Prussian General staff was world class. At that time, common sense, to any civilian, would have meant that before you start an offensive to go deep into enemy territory you stockpile ammunition, rations, grain for the horses, and other supplies. At the same time, anyone who saw a fog bank would have known the wind is not uniform but blows into banks, swirls around empty patches, and even blows “backwards” too.

You will recall that both sides had built built a vast network of trenches, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean… Stalemate, as blocked as Brexit… Both sides still hoped for an offensive, taking pains to feed and care for vast stocks of cavalry horses… to use for a glorious breakout past the trenches! Such an innocent hope. 

According to my childhood How and Why Wonder Book of WWI, eventually both sides sought to break the deadlock by finding a secret weapon: The Germans found theirs first. One day, when the wind was fair, they opened valves and advanced behind poison gas… Allied soldiers fell back, gasping and stumbling. The German’s own gas, as they advanced, sometimes blew back in their faces. Which was a problem, as the Germans had no masks and had neglected to stockpile any. Later they would even have masks for their horses, (seen in photographs) but there would be no breakout offensive, not that day. Whither common sense?

Quotation

Servicemen and learned experts know that war is not glorious, a lesson that each generation of regular civilians seems to need to re-discover. 

In the televised Sarah Connor Chronicles, as played by Lena Headey, in one of her voiceovers, Sarah muses on innocence lost:

QUOTE

In 1678 doctors diagnosed a mental affliction soldiers suffered from as 'nostalgia' - homesickness, a longing to return to the past. The cruel reality of war is that there is no return home. No return to innocence. What is lost, is lost forever. Like my father, war's wounds have bled me dry. No words of comfort; no words of forgiveness. No words at all.

UNQUOTE

From the episode Strange Things Happen at the One-Two Point. 

I like Sarah; I have her on my blog list of labels.

Poem

You may recall that just as wooden milking stools use three legs for maximum stability on an uneven dirt floor, so too did did the Martian fighting machines, great black “boilers on stilts,” use three legs.

Losing Innocence

Uncle Jack was the only one who never hurt me.

In the town of Panchester, one day, I was scared.

The Martians! The Martians!

Uncle Jack had gone to the butchers.

I was on my way to find him when I saw It:

A dark dome half obscured by the stone buildings,

moving, bobbing, sinister.

I crouched below the porch of the church, afraid to look,

unseeing, 

my mouth wide open.

It was coming this way,

I had never in my life heard my Uncle Jack yell in terror,

but I knew his voice, 

when I heard his scream.

I glimpsed a man across the street.

In a split second a dark tentacle snatched him up,

as a massive pole-leg thumped down and rushed on.

At last,

I walked further down the block.

Jack had been picked up and dashed against a wall.

I went back.

I ran up the church steps and inside to the right,

up a narrow stair,

and trembled into a ten-by-ten wooden steeple.

Knees weak, I staggered to the window 

knelt small,

with my hands and chin on the ledge.

Where was It?

There. Going up the valley rim.

Gone.

I pressed against the wall and cried.

Not the even rhythm of a child crying,

not the even sobbing of a woman,

but a cry irregular, 

rising, gasping, falling, gasping.

I would never be loved by Uncle Jack.

Never.

Exhausted,

I stretched out,

flattened to the floor,

cheek resting on the sweet old wood.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

2019

Footnote: 

H.G. Wells is a classic writer because he knew classic human nature, such as authority lacking common sense.

To document a certain lack of common sense in the present day, there has been a series of BBC exposes on the London Marathon, an exposure of unacceptable behaviour that has been going on for years. The BBC reports of this year have been about the slower, distressed marathoners being abused by staff. Here is one report about someone with, luckily for her,  a little more self-esteem than others might have because she is supposed to be slow, as a pace setter:

Abuse Science

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

I must confess the stress and dangers of the times have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind.

H. G. Wells, at the conclusion of The War of the Worlds.

… and I started seeing therapists when I was 18,19, and it wasn’t until I was in my mid-30s that someone used the word abuse to describe what had happened. So, once it was named everything shifted.

From a CBC radio transcript regarding sibling abuse. (see footnote)

Hello Reader,

Got abuse knowledge?

Sometimes you don’t need to know the theory for you to be practical. Our ancestors thought electricity was like a water current. It’s not, it’s electrons, but that didn’t stop them from lighting up their cities, and making frog legs kick.

They thought human nerve tissue was like solid electrical wires. Actually, the nerves have numerous gaps where particles are released and go across. But that didn’t stop good medical work.

Sometimes you don’t even need science theories. Hey, would you like to abuse your cult followers, so you become a millionaire? Science has studied some cults, and come up with practical observations of how they work. (Such as deprivation of protein and sleep) But the first cult leaders had no science. 

Out on the mean streets, to my knowledge, there are no learned texts on how to abuse a stable of women in order to make them controllable… but pimps seem to be doing quite well without any science. 

One morning my housemate came down the hall telling me she must have gotten a black eye in her sleep. A lie. She was “abused into thinking” that being struck by her boyfriend-pimp was OK, even if this was also something to be hidden from me. She later became a streetwalker. I remember her crying while saying she didn’t understand, just didn’t know how she had been manipulated by her boyfriend into turning her first trick, but somehow it happened. Then more tricks. Eventually, “we lost her” because her pimp transferred her to a distant city, to have her far away from any emotional support from we who knew her. This is standard practise, but not something a vulnerable girl is going to find out from her local library.

I don’t know of any scientific proof or medical explanation for how abuse could conceivably, possibly, have any lasting effects whatsoever—but maybe I don’t need to know. What prompted this blog essay was a man writing in the essay collection This I Believe that his father (whom he went fishing with weekly) would strike him in the face, and that he lacked self confidence… but he didn’t draw a bold connecting line between those two points. I was angry, not at him but at his surrounding society, our society where people don’t want to connect the dots. 

Although I am here using “abuse” in the context of human against human, while noting the lack of applicable scientific theories, it is instructive to consider “alcohol abuse.” The highly trained medical establishment, back when my parents were children, had barely made a start in creating knowledge for curing the scourge of alcoholism… and then some untrained stockbroker created the program of 12—Steps of recovery. The 12—Steps worked much better than the efforts of doctors with Ph.Ds, despite the fact that nobody knew why. Some years ago my university chaplain said to me, speaking theoretically, as neither one of us were an alcoholic, “You know the problem with university guys like us? We want to know why, know exactly how the program works, before we are willing to get started.”

As I see it, our society doesn’t “get it”: doesn’t realize “why” abuse has consequences, and doesn’t even realize how little it knows about the gruesome, monstrous effects of abuse. Lacking a scientific theory, not knowing how abuse works, we use our alleged “common sense.” If only walls could talk I might hear talk about a boy or girl:  “Abuse doesn’t mean anything.” … “She shouldn’t be affected.” … “It never happened, and anyways, she deserved it.”

Without science we may believe, or pretend to ourselves we believe, “Once she grows up and leaves our Abusive home she should instantly snap out of it, and be a fine credit to our family.” Actually, I’m making that up: Because a family wouldn’t use the “A-word.” No, it seems to me that a father, mother or sibling who is weak enough to abuse, is also too weak to admit the effects of abuse, and too weak to feel guilt or shame: Easier to blame the victim. A family voice that sounds falsely strong from expressing anger and scorn may conceal a pathetic weakness. “My wife is so stupid, she makes me so mad, that I have to hit her.” In other words, blaming and thinking “she is so stupid” can happen after the first abuse, not before.

Decades ago, society made a huge breakthrough with a phrase for raising consciousness: “blaming the victim.” That sure opened a lot of windows! My concern is when victims of abuse blame themselves. My concern is when, without science, they come to minimize, to think “nothing very bad” happened: Thinking that, in fact, they should instantaneously be as fully functional as anyone who was never abused. And then feel guilty. I say: “Come on, get serious. Don’t you think recovery will take at least a day or two? A week or two? Seasons? Years?” 

I can’t scientifically prove it, but this I believe: It is natural for an abuse victim to lack confidence in the world, and to lack confidence in other people, too. 

Society, as embodied in that “mythical successful businessman,” might claim that phrases like “self-esteem” and “recovery from abuse” and “positive thinking” is woo-woo southern California nonsense. Strange, then, how that same businessman will evaluate job candidates for self-esteem, and insist his salesforce have positive thinking. In other words, at some level, we all know. We might abuse our children by saying, “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about!” but we know. When we bully, we know. We just don’t want to admit it. I’m amazed at the ten-year high school reunion where a grown adult didn’t think his high school victim would still remember, let alone have any hard feelings— and I’m disgusted. 

I’m not going to wait for stupid scientists to finally do their research. No. I think it’s quite practical right now to “act as if” verbal, emotional and physical abuse—three separate things—are like a blow against a person, just as much as the onrushing blow of concussion from artillery. 

Regardless of whether a blow is physical or figurative, it still happens. To quote a former soldier, now back in civilian life:

“… I felt horrible… I lost my self-confidence and stopped believing in myself. I also constantly panicked during conversations, and afterwards I always felt guilty.” (p. 208)

“My goal for the future is to get better and to became a “better person,” not to feel guilty anymore, to be calmer and relaxed.” (p. 213)

(As reported in When the War Never Ends

The voices of military members with ptsd and their families

By Leah Wizelman)

Well soldier, me too. …I’m much better now…

Sean Crawford

November

On the lone prairie,

2017

Footnotes:

Someone asks me: How do I know if was abused, or if, these days, I am being abusive to others?

Easy: Anything that is not nurturing is abusive.

“Ya but Sean, isn’t there a vast middle ground?”

Sean: “No.” 

~The adult former bully is quoted in my essay of innocence, Saving Tomorrow Land archived August 2015

~H.G. Wells is quoted in my PTSD essay, Poetics of H.G.Wells, archived November 2015

~The soldier is quoted in my book announcement, posted as Voices of PTSD, archived June 2012

~That first trick? My housemate and her boyfriend had visited a prairie city three hours away, across the cold barren plains, and then the boyfriend told her they needed cash for the fare home.

~Here’s a link where someone turned abuse and complex PTSD into a science fiction novel. If the cover looks a little ugly, well, it’s an ugly topic.

~What I loved about my self-help group, where we mainly looked normal and had jobs and marriages, was how we could tell each other stories society would never believe, and we would believe each other. …Otherwise I might still feel like poor lonely Sarah Connor in the scene where she jumps over the desk screaming, “It happens!”

~Not sibling rivalry, not just bullying, but abuse: Here’s a link for a CBC radio program, with transcript, about the horror of sibling abuse. It happens.

Sarah, Surveillance and Racism

Sarah, Surveillance and Racism

“Let justice roll down like waters,

And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Amos 5:24

Hello Reader,

Got genre reflecting life?

Continuing from earlier in August, I want to say that another genre that reflects life is science fiction.

This month I am going through a sci-fi TV series from a more innocent time, a time of almost a decade ago. In The Sarah Connor Chronicles from 2008 we see people using modern cellular telephones while still holding to their innocent beliefs.

Today we know better, maybe. Sadly, many Americans will have seen that movie Snowden by Oliver Stone where the staff of the NSA watch the six o’clock news and see their boss lying to Congress about whether the NSA staff are spying on loyal Americans. This while it could be said of those staff, as the prophet Jeremiah said, “Not one is righteous, no, not one” Not one regular staffer blows a whistle. 

People keep writing Edward Snowden was a “contractor,” with a disturbing implication: That only a “contractor,” would or should reveal the NSA’s dirty tricks against the republic. What rubbish! This is like saying “only” a “reservist” should blow the whistle if the regular army massacres a village or runs a prison torture system. Again, rubbish! Every man and woman in service to their country, whether contractor, regular or reserve, should know in their bones that “only following orders” is not a legal excuse. (And know that it’s not legal to lie to Congress) That’s why the allies hung people at Nuremberg, right? Just as they hung war criminals in Japan.

Have tempers cooled since the war? To use a scientist’s thought experiment: Should a bleeding heart conservative, who owns a time machine, go back and rescue those German war criminals? No. Granted, it might pluck at our heartstrings down the decades to see war criminals who are bent, limping, senior citizens being hunted down like animals and dragged off for trial—but no. For such cruelty, a noted Nazi hunter had a reply, saying in effect: “The war criminals of tomorrow are already living among us as children today. They need to see there will be consequences…” There is no statute of limitations for murder.

Which brings me back to clear-eyed Sarah Connor and her son John. Sarah knows that if she fails to stop SkyNet, then the consequence will be a rain of blinding fire and bleached skulls. Her resulting sensibility is grim: Maybe it is from her grimness that she doesn’t show the expected horror that would be the normal reaction, back in 2008, to seeing a whole town secretly under surveillance. This by capitalists like Google, not by the government. Today, needless to say, we are mostly ignoring “technocreep” in our lives—by our own electronic devices! We of today have something in common with that 2008 town where the people have been hoodwinked. Maybe not against their will, but without their consent… 

Surely the greatest weapon of any tyranny, (as a Robert Heinlein character noted) be it a Muslim theocracy or a communist People’s Republic, is secrecy. Censorship. In the case of that town, secrecy includes self-censorship. Sarah attends a town funeral where even after 35 workers have suddenly died… people still say they don’t want to know what the company was doing. 

A tearful widow talks to Sarah, saying she “never knew” her husband. Sarah stays silent, although that same husband, a week ago, tried to murder her. 

The metaphor? Besides surveillance? It’s like any town, from any time-space location within “1970-U.S.A.,” where the white women “don’t know” what their menfolk are doing… turning their heads away from jail beatings by cops, and planted evidence… ignoring their husband’s dirty excuses to keep a trial from being “removed” from racist state courts to the federal courts. This even though the “law of removal” was explicitly passed to prevent racism in courtrooms against civil rights workers. The town stood for any little county or city where police beatings and killings are performed at the direction of “the establishment,” the culture, and therefore won’t be stopped, not until the white culture is stopped. But can culture be stopped? Today? As it happens, today liberals are making “culture” a sacred cow. In Canada, for instance, the liberal party believes Government must not say that barbaric practises of another culture, such as honor killings and female genital mutilation, are “barbaric practises, “ and Government mustn’t teach this judgement to new immigrants.

(Note: the values of the enlightenment, from the 1700s, are not picked up by immigrants by magic. Not automatically. In Finland this week it was an asylum seeker, after two years of living in freedom, who went on a terror spree. Here’s a link in English to a proud Finn)

In Sarah’s town the widows and orphans are as clear as light bulbs: They say they don’t want to know, they don’t want to change.

We of today, less innocent, don’t want to know, perhaps, why the U.S. Congress, while claiming there is nothing to fear from surveillance, would not therefore pardon Edward Snowden… meanwhile is also claiming to be be afraid of the surveillance of Hillary Clinton. (by the Russians) Disciples of Big Brother have a word for that: double-think. 

Back in 1970, I must admit, when we said, “If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem,” back when I myself was walking the earth and wondering about God, I was NOT trying to educate racists in the United States. Just as today U.S. Muslims are NOT trying to educate people over in Arabia that “Islam means peace.” Partly because, let’s admit it, many Americans,  not just Muslims, can’t spell “war effort.” (War on Terror) To be fair, some of those same Muslims DID once help educate the South Africans that “apartheid is wrong.” 

A 1970 level of white racism is something I would not be acclimated to. These days, like science fiction writer John Scalzi, I could happily live in a small town in Ohio where “everybody and their dog” voted for President Donald Trump, but no, I could not now live in a 1970 southern U.S. town like Omelas.  I’d have to walk away.  

In a 1970 town, according to a 1976 book I’m reading by John Perkins, Let Justice Roll Down the worst racists are in the white Christian churches. Yes, I know that’s sounds crazy, yet Perkins, a Christian who was bruised for other’s iniquities, reasons out his belief about whites quite carefully. Meanwhile, in our own century, in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, (T:TSCC) a spiritual Black man, who attends Bible studies, teaches a chained up artificial intelligence to know right from wrong. He explains to the machine that killing is wrong “Because we are all God’s children.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t expect my white neighbors, if they have known only respect, dignity and easy lives, to care about right and wrong the way I do.

The childhood of Sarah’s son John is, for me, a special metaphor. I don’t relate to the adult version of John, in a space-time where he is the very confident leader of the resistance, but I can sure relate him as a growing boy living in a state of hiding. Because as John would say, I too grew up knowing “You are never safe!” 

John could not be protected by twenty F.B.I. agents in the episode What He Beheld, and I could not be protected by two parents. Nor protected from them. The good news is that I’ve grown up into a person who cares about Blacks and my clients, into a functional citizen, caring enough to try to understand the world. I would agree with Sarah Connor: As Sarah knows in her bones, knows when stress knifes into her so badly she attends a Sleep Institute because she can’t sleep at night… Never give up!

…as genre reflects life…

Sean Crawford

Under the big sky of Alberta

August 

2017

SIDEBAR

Edward Snowden, to his credit, used a “check and balance” by going to solid citizens with “journalist ethics” and then letting them decide whether to publish. 

~Journalists (at least in the British Commonwealth, and presumably also in the U.S.A.) will never turn traitor just for a “scoop.” The gentlemen of the press to whom Snowden confided obviously did not think Snowden was a traitor. Furthermore, ethical reporters won’t print a fact if they cannot either attribute it to a source or at least know themselves that it is utterly true. (For example, they won’t attribute that Paris is the capital of France, but they will attribute how much cargo flows into the Paris docks “according to the Minister of Transport”) 

As newspaper editors know, for a news reporter, a factual error is as rare as a soldier dropping his rifle on parade. Yes I know, magazine editors use “fact checkers,” (a practice some folks such as Peter Drucker disagree with) but remember, sometimes their periodical writers are not like honorable samurai, not like self-respecting reporters “riding for the brand” of journalism ethics, but sometimes are like dishonored ronin, merely “hired guns.”

(A sidebar for stupid trolls has been deleted)  

Footnotes: 

~I pondered the culture of wholesome clean cut Americans, without involving their wives, allowing themselves to believe in surveillance in my essay Reflections on Surveillance archived October 2013

~I wrote of Sarah Connor in my essay Sarah, Terminators and Feminists archived July 2011

~In the context of innocent John Connor, I wrote of the morality of mainstream Hollywood in my essay Morality, Boys and Hollywood archived July 2013.

~While I’m forever astonished at the cancelation of the show Firefly, (link to my buddy Blair’s review) I am merely frustrated that T:TSCC was canceled from the Fox network. A nerd on the Internet said the show was too philosophical for those expecting a bang-bang action show.

Note to self: Never try to place your TV series on Fox.