Sometimes I wonder if everything we do in our modern world makes us intrinsically less human, distilling passion and instincts into gray suits and briefcases. Are most of the populous really living to the full potential of our race? Where is the action, the desperation of true love, and the intricate sword play in our every day lives?
In ancient Rome, people walked around armed with swords. There was always a potential threat. A word could get you killed if it landed on the wrong ears. Sex was for anyone who had but a need or a whim for release and everyone was doing it openly with everybody else. If the husband didn’t like being cuckolded, he could simply go out and kill the man his wife was sleeping with. No one would begrudge him this satisfaction.
Today, we have the right to bear arms in this country, but the majority of people that I associate with on a daily basis don’t. Some even openly reject that right, supporting many gun control laws that would keep guns out of the hands of most American citizens.
One observation I’ve made is that the interpretation of the right to bear arms has been distorted. It was originally intended to describe the right to form a militia in order to defend our rights. Now people see the right to bear arms as the right to protect themselves with hand-weapons as opposed to the right to defend the belief system upon which our country was founded. People want to be able to carry concealed weapons or keep guns locked in their cars while they’re at work, or even keep rifles in their homes as if they lived in the Old West.
I am aware that my view on gun control is based mostly on my urban upbringing. If New Yorkers were allowed legally to carry concealed weapons, I think all hell would break loose. Even without a law allowing us to carry lethal weapons, there is sometimes a persistent sense of compression in the city, like at any moment something might pop. Objects could be set in motion that could change our circumstances or our lives at any moment. I feel it often when it’s late at night and I’m taking the subway home with only one or two other occupants in my car. I’ve also felt it as a scuffle between a few men catches my eye from across a crowded street. That sense of compression stays in tact because people do whatever they can, for the most part, to keep themselves cool and contained, with a few exceptions.
Most of the time, when we get angry, it festers with no outlet, eating us alive from the inside out. Rather than attack others, we attack ourselves and blame ourselves for not being able to keep things together. Sure, sometimes we’ll talk things out behind closed doors, but very rarely is there the possible threat of one of us killing another.
Be assured that I am talking from the perspective of a young, private school educated, urban woman. I know that crimes of passion happen every day, but they certainly aren’t happening in my every day life or within the circle of people I normally associate with. I’m also not suggesting that we should all be barbarians and begin killing each other every five seconds and gnawing on turkey legs in our spare time.
The word “barbarian” perplexes me. What does it really mean? The vision of Ancient Rome I described earlier certainly had some barbaric elements, but there was a general movement towards an organized government, which, by definition, is not barbarism.
Then again, I think what I admire most about interpretations and historical accounts of ancient Rome are the more impulsive, passionate qualities of the culture. That is what I mean when I say I wonder if we are “distilling” humanity in our modern culture. I think a lot of people have lost touch with what it means to live in a high stakes environment, to feel the life coursing through their veins or to act on their needs with conviction on a daily basis.
I began thinking about all of this a few weeks ago when a friend of mine from Florida mentioned that people there are allowed to shoot trespassers who come onto their property on sight.
“Holy shit!” I exclaimed incredulously, always the articulate blogger. “But you can’t kill them, can you?”
He just laughed at me and shrugged. “Sometimes when you shoot ‘em, you kill ‘em.”
So even though I often wonder where the passion has gone while I’m making my commute to and from work amidst the milling herd, wondering when we all got slipped our daily dose of “soma,” I am also horrified at the opposite end of the spectrum. It just shocks me that in some parts of the country, entering someone’s property is enough to warrant violence without warning and murder without much punishment. There’s just something about that idea that doesn’t sit comfortably in the pit of my stomach.
It gives me this image of an orange farmer screaming, “This. is. FLORIDAAAAA!” while brandishing an AK-47.
When I was a kid, I used to play with flashlight lightsabers and go to the movies with my friends. From what I hear of rural childhoods, “blowin’ shit up” is a regular after-school activity. YouTube is overflowing with videos of kids from throughout the center of this country blowing up whatever they can find in front of a camera. I even stumbled across one video where a few teenagers were wading into the Mississippi River to find tube worm mound colonies, a staple of that particular ecosystem, and setting them on the ground, followed by shooting them to kingdom come with rifles. The had no clue that they were probably destroying the ecology of that part of the riverbed and were more interested in seeing the strange gooey blobs get blown to smithereens. I also got the impression that they wouldn’t have cared much if they did know about their possible eco-footprint.
This sort of dispassionate violence is what frightens me. A majority of our youth is disconnected from the fact that guns are not toys. They are absolutely lethal. The NRA famously insists that “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” However, I’m going to have to jump on the band wagon with British comedian and actor Eddie Izzard here and say, “Yes, but the guns certainly help.”
I remember holding a water gun and pointing at my Dad when I was a little girl.
“Bang, bang, Daddy!” I shouted, holding the gun at his face, point blank.
He moved the gun away from his face with the palm of his and looked at me very seriously. “Never point a gun at someone unless you mean to kill them.”
Sure, it was just a water gun, but my father made certain that I knew what that toy represented. He said his father had imparted the same wisdom to him.
Dispassionate people own lethal weapons in states like Texas and Florida and they can use them without much cause or repercussion. I’m perplexed and torn. On the one hand, I think it is our right to protect ourselves and our families and that people, given the proper licencing, should be able to own guns, though I realize it’s still hard to control how many guns get into unqualified hands. Plus, the dramatic part of me wants my life to be an epic and adventurous tale worthy of the Odyssey. On the other hand, I don’t think we should be teaching our children that guns are a worthwhile “pass-time.” Hunting for food when food needs to be hunted is one thing. Blowing up bear bottles and Indiana Jones action figures for no reason is another. Plus, in terms of our humanity, I don’t think we need the danger of weapons or our lives constantly hanging in the balance to spur us into living a fulfilling life.
Violence isn’t the answer, but I think dispassion is an epidemic.
How do you cure dispassion? How do you light the proverbial fire under humanity’s ass?
When Prometheus stole fire from the Zeus on Mount Olympus and brought it to the mortals below, he took a risk. He wagered his life to bring warmth and knowledge to his fellow man. His story isn’t famous today because of violence, but because of his daring and his contribution to mankind. There is also the bit about how he was punished by having his liver be eaten out by vultures only to grow back every day for all of eternity, but that’s beside the point.
Maybe, what we all need to spice up our lives is a little calculated risk taking. Set your sights on something and go for it. Don’t let opportunities pass you by. Listen to that little voice in your head when it tells you to do something. Listening to your instincts is what keeps you from being a sheep in the middle of a herd.
Last night I watched Contact twice. Not once. Twice. In a row.
The movie came out in 1997 when I was 12 years old. I was in 6th grade and absolutely obsessed with outer space. I even had my own armory in my closet which consisted of space blasters, lightsabers, and Jedi armor. As a Girl Scout, I was taught to always be prepared. Let’s just say that if Darth Vader had materialized in my room, I could have easily been ready for an old fashioned Jedi showdown.
I certainly loved everything to do with Star Wars and most other sci-fi/fantasy universes, but I also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wanted to be an astronaut. I was serious about learning everything I could concerning NASA, its history, and development.
It was only natural for my father to take me one Sunday afternoon to see Contact, the film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s book by the same title. As we sat in the cool, dark movie theater, I didn’t even resent him for not letting me get candy or popcorn. I was going to see a space movie and that was all that mattered.
As the story unfolded, I idolized the heroine, Eleanor Arroway, who was played to perfection by Jodi Foster. She was so brave and strong willed. She fought for what she wanted and at the end of the movie, no one even believed her story. It made me incredibly sad for her. I marveled at how the director had used well-edited clips of Bill Clinton to make it seem like he was speaking about building the alien transport system and responding to questions about the fictional events presented in the movie. There were even interviews with my favorite hosts from “The Today Show.” which I watched every morning before school. It was almost as if the whole thing had really happened right under my nose. The audience was implied as a part of the story because the movie had incorporated figures from our daily life.
I remember leaving the theater and tugging on my Dad’s arm and asking,
“Daddy, what’s a worm hole?”
“Daddy, I can’t believe that they didn’t believe she went to Vega!”
“Daddy! Which star is Vega?”
“Daddy! How long is a lightyear? No wait! What’s a black hole?”
The list went on and on and my dorky, lovable father, who is a professional know-it-all, patiently answered all of my questions. The movie had perked my interest in the mapping of space rather than its deeper themes.
Watching Contact 11 years later is a completely different experience. I’m an actress and not an astronaut. I’m a writer with a critical mind and not a child with a dramatic sense of wonder. After such a large perspective shift, anyone is bound to see things differently than when they were 12 years old. Still, I was especially struck by the difference in my point of view on this particular film.
I no longer saw a film full of whimsical science fiction and alien technology, but a story about how we as humans can reconcile faith in a modern world where science is sometimes made out to be be anti-religious. After all, we’ve gotten to the point where certain religious institutions do not want to teach evolution because they believe that its heretical.
When I was younger, faith wasn’t an integral part of my life. I’m the daughter of a Protestant mother and a Jewish father. We attended church pretty much only when my grandmother was in town and went to the synagogue only when a friend had his or her bar or bat mitzvah. I was allowed to believe in what I wanted to believe, but because of my own interests in science, I tended to side with Jodi Foster’s character in Contact.
I saw no evidence for or against God, but I did see a lot of civil limitations connected to Christianity.
I have always been very supportive of my gay family members and hearing the “religious right” tell the world that marriage is for a man and a woman has always seemed outrageous to me. My uncles have every right to same advantages my parents have. Seeing religious rallies against a woman’s right to choose abortion if she felt she couldn’t properly care for her child seemed like yet another misplaced limitation being forced on women.
As a child, I had seen religion as an obstacle and that’s how I identified it in regards to this film. I wanted Eleanor Arroway to be chosen to represent humankind on their mission to contact alien life and I was outraged that just because she didn’t have a strong connection to a higher power, that she was discriminated against. “What about that separation of church and state thingy?” I had asked my father afterwards.
Religion in the form of cult worship is demonized in the movie and made into the very the source of terrorist acts and the backbone of the suicide bomber who disrupts the alien machine’s first test, killing the initial candidate for the mission and destroying the entire aparatus.
What I wasn’t mature enough to recognize in 1997 was that “faith” can be separated from religion. To me, faith is an odd mixture of trust and determination. In Contact, there is a communal sense of faith in God that Eleanor Arroway doesn’t identify with. However, she experiences faith in the unknown throughout the whole film, even when no one believes in her project or in the end, her journey. She heads a project that is running out of funding which requires her to sit alone for hours, listening for a signal from beyond that may never come. Despite the odds, she knows she has to be there if it does. When others want to give up on her project, she insists that it’s necessary, convincing them of its importance despite the fact that she can’t provide a foreseeable result of her studies. When the other scientists want to add a chair with straps to the alien design for the pod, Arroway questions them. “Shouldn’t we have a little faith?” When she is offered a cyanide tablet, she refuses it, retorting that she didn’t come this far to bail out on the Vegans who sent their message across the stars. She intends to see it through to the very end and directly as instructed by the message she received. She trusts their plans for her with no guarantee of success or survival.
When the movie ended back in 1997, my 12-year-old self was most interested in the fact that no one believed that Arroway’s pod had traveled to Vega. I revelled as the president’s adviser stuck it to the movie’s “villain,” announcing that there although there was only white noise on the whole video recording of Arroway’s journey, it lasted for exactly the amount of time Arroway had claimed to be in transit form Earth to Vega.
“Ok to go,” Arroway states over and over again as she readies herself for that epic journey. She trembles as the terror takes over. She has no idea how this machine will work. She has only been able to speculate up until this point. Yet Arroway presses on. She has planned for this moment her entire life. The fear keeps her from being able to fall back into the comfort of her precious logic. She must simply be vulnerable to the experience.
As the pod moves through space, she can see through its walls,racing through worm holes and floating amidst gas formations only seen before in the form of Hubble Telescope images. Her eyes are wide. There isn’t even a hint of analysis or calculation in her gaze as she unstraps herself from the chair, looking out into the starry masterpiece. “So beautiful… It’s so beautiful,” is all she can muster.
When she finally arrives on the beaches of Vega, she is greeted not by an alien life form, but by her father, the man who inspired her to begin her work with audio analysis in the first place. She reconnects with the origins of her life’s journey, while at the same time she is meeting with the unknown, making contact with both past and future simultaneously. The Vegans never appear to Eleanor in their true form. She must decide for herself whether to believe she has had and encounter with an alien life form or merely hallucinated a meeting with her dead father.
“This is just the beginning. This is just contact,” Her father says to her, tenderly brushing her cheek with his fingertips.
Listening to that line, I think of all of those times I’ve heard people say, “That’s when I found God.” Arroway is given a precious, life affirming experience, something she cannot deny whether the experience was real or simply a vision.
Even though I’m not sure if I believe in God in the Christian sense, I can I identify with moments when I’ve felt something more, or gained a sense of the unknown. This film suggests that our great human need for discovering and connecting with the unknown is not only present in the ritual of daily prayer, but in our scientific reach for what lies beyond our star system. Science does not have to be anti-religious and at the same time we don’t have to believe in a higher power to sustain faith. We can sustain faith simply by believing in something great than ourselves, whether that lies in Heaven or beyond the reaches of the Milky Way.
