Star Wars: A Discussion (Episode III)

No, we're not actually up to The Force Awakens, yet. Don't worry; we'll get there.
Eventually.

When my oldest son was not quite two, my wife gave me the boxed (VHS) set of Special Edition for Christmas. My son was not a TV watcher; I mean, we didn't even have TV (still don't). He wasn't (yet) a video watcher either. He wasn't even two and we didn't really have any videos for him to sit and watch. When I put A New Hope in to watch it, it didn't occur to either of us (my wife and me) that he would pay any attention to it. But he did.

He sat down and was mesmerized by it and, when it was over and he got up, he was someone different. He was Luke Skywalker. I'm being serious. He got up and immediately began running around the house as if he was Luke. It was, quite frankly, amazing. By the time we'd watched the full trilogy, the transformation was complete.

Amusing story time:
Those of you with kids will know that two-year-olds aren't the best talkers in the world. Well, ours started saying "fuck" to us. That, also, was amazing and a surprise, because we couldn't figure out where he'd heard it, since we didn't use that kind of language around him. But he'd run into the kitchen and yell "fuck!" and run out again and, really, just leave us bemused. So, one day, he and I were at Target together going through the toys (because I was still collecting Star Wars stuff at the time and, actually, the kid was starting his own collection, too). As we went down one of the aisles, he began yelling "fuck! fuck!" over and over again. People were looking and I was, frankly, embarrassed. I was trying to shush him and sped up to get off the aisle then, as we rounded the corner at the end, he started pointing, too, and stating "fuck!" even more emphatically. And, so, I looked to see what he was pointing at: an endcap display of Millennium Falcons. The "fuck!" That was all he could say of it. It was one of those "oh" moments and it all made sense.

Still incredibly embarrassing, though, because you can't go to everyone and explain to them that your two-year-old is not really swearing, as if they'd believe you anyway, right?


My oldest son was old enough to see The Phantom Menace in the theater when it came out, though he doesn't remember it -- he was only three, after all -- but my second son was released right in the middle of the trilogy. Oh, um, I mean, he was born during the midst of the prequels. He was a great baby, and we could take him to any movie with us, and he would sleep right through it. We couldn't take our oldest son to many movies, because all he wanted to do was get up and walk around. Star Wars was an exception. But, for the first year of his life, we took the second child to all of our movies with us, including Pearl Harbor, which we were sure was going to wake him up it was so loud, but he slept right through it. That lasted right up until May of 2002.

Don't get me wrong, Attack of the Clones was fine. He didn't sleep through it, but he also didn't fuss. What we didn't know was that our one year and change baby was watching the movie. How do we know? Well, sometime after the release of Clones, my wife and I had gone to see some movie that wasn't Star Wars. I don't remember what movie it was, but it was a date movie, and we took the younger boy with us because he had always been fine in movies. Not this time, though.

No, for that movie (whatever it was), he started crying and fussing almost as soon as the movie started. It was unprecedented.

So I did what any good person should do and I took my son out of the theater leaving my wife to watch our date movie alone. I wandered around the theater for a while holding him. When he finally calmed down, we tried going back to the theater but, almost as soon as I sat down next to my wife, he started back up again. After a couple of times of that, I gave up on going back in and had decided to just stand around in the hallway until the movie was over... except that Attack of the Clones was showing in the theater across the hall, so I decided to go just inside the door to see if I could watch a bit of that.

And this is where it gets interesting because my son, my son who was just over a year old, sat up to watch the movie. He almost instantly became totally engrossed in it. But it's hard to tell things with babies since they can't actually communicate with you, so I decided to experiment with him. Yes, I did an experiment with kid. I walked back to the movie I was supposed to be seeing where he immediately got upset again. Then, I went back to Clones where he started watching again. I went into every other movie in that hall, about half a dozen, and he got upset in every one of them. Attack of the Clones was the only movie he would watch. So, well, we sat down and finished the movie, and he sat quietly and watched the whole thing. By the time it was over, I only had to wait for my wife for about 10 minutes.

For the record, that was the last time we took him to the movies with us. Well, until Revenge of the Sith came out, at any rate.

I don't have any stories like that about my daughter, but she is as fully immersed as the boys at this point. She loves R2-D2, Wicket, and BB-8.
Incidentally, they are watching Return of the Jedi as I finish this up. My wife and I have been out, and they were watching it when we got home. That's the way our house is.

Next post, we'll start into The Force Awakens.

You Can't Have It Both Ways

Most of you reading this can probably remember back to September 11, 2001. You remember the shock and horror that we -- and I use that term globally, because the whole world was shocked and horrified -- all felt. Shocked because no one could understand why anyone would do such a thing. Horrified because we couldn't understand how it had happened. Why it had happened...

Why did it happen? Why did our government let such a thing as terrorists attacking the country happen? Or, an even better question, how did our government allow the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor. Surely (as conspiracy theorists have been saying for decades), the government knew. And, to bring it up to date, how did the French government allow the Charlie Hebdo massacre? I mean, they had had one of those guys in jail not all that long before. They had to have known!

Someone, somewhere, failed to act and allowed these things to happen because, you know, they could have stopped them. Should have. They should have proactively stopped the bad guys before they had done anything wrong. You know, like in Minority Report. Surely, the government has future-reading psychics hidden away somewhere and know about all the bad things before they happen and are just picking and choosing which atrocities to stop (hmm... and that kind of sounds like what the British did during World War II once they had cracked the Enigma machine).

Look, it would be great if we could see the future and know, for sure, who was going to do what bad thing and when, but that's just not how the world works. Some people will do bad things and some people will only talk about doing bad things, and it's difficult to tell which is which. It leaves us with two options:
1. Catch the bad guys after they do the bad things.
or
2. Toss people in jail (or worse) just because we think they might do a bad thing.

There's this conversation in Captain America: The Winter Soldier about this topic -- actually, the whole movie is about this topic, but there's one particular exchange that really captures it -- between Nick Fury and Captain America:

Nick -- "We're going to neutralize a lot of threats before they even happen."
Cap -- "I thought the punishment usually came after the crime."

I think this is the central conflict not just in the United States but in all of Western culture, right now. How do you balance the need to feel secure against the need for something that is actual just (as in justice) treatment for all people? I mean, it's one thing to shoot a man down who has pulled a gun on you, but it's another thing entirely to shoot a lot of people down for no other reason than you think they might have a gun on them. Or might be thinking about getting a gun.

In general, I think we, as a people, really do believe in the idea of justice, the idea that no one should be persecuted or punished before s/he's done anything wrong. Punishment comes after the crime. However, when something like the Charlie Hebdo massacre happens, we immediately start up with, "Why didn't you stop them?" And that supposes that we should, somehow, not only know that the person(s) was going to do something but that we should also catch and punish that person before the crime has been committed.

Sometimes, it's the same person crying foul over assassinations and drone strikes one day then demanding to know why some terrorist wasn't put away before killing some people. It's not a thing you can have both ways.

And the truth... well, the truth is that some people are going to do bad things, and there's nothing we can do to stop all of them... that is unless we stop everyone that we even slightly suspect. That means, well, that means you, because virtually everyone I have ever known has gotten mad at some point and threatened someone else. So we either have a society with no freedom but total security, or we have a society with freedom and risks where we do the best we can and allow people the opportunity to do the right thing. Yeah, it's a hard choice, especially after an extreme act of violence, but you can't have it both ways.

It's time we make a choice and stick to that choice and uphold that choice. Me? I choose freedom.
Every time.