Power

I don't got it. You don't got it. They have all of it.

My partner and I just finished watching the last season of 'Angel' (the spinoff show from 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'). The whole series (though fun and campy on the surface) deals with big issues like free will, destiny, the soul, and whether the best efforts of the little guys like us have the slightest effect on the world. The main characters' world is repeatedly turned upside down by revelations that this or that incredibly powerful being or organization has been pulling strings behind the scenes, rendering everything they've done for the last - say - four years pretty much meaningless. There is a powerful scene at the end of one season in which the protagonist Angel makes a seemingly last-ditch effort to destroy the 'Senior Partners' of one particular evil organization... only to find that the Senior Partners are merely the personification of the evil that dwells within the hearts of humankind. To destroy them would require the complete purification of humans (how likely is that?) or the destruction of humankind (which is what many of the demons in the show are trying for anyway). Angel, having thought he was travelling down to Hell to combat the Senior Partners, finds himself back on the mortal plane - the implication being that this IS Hell. He slowly walks away down the street of L.A. as sirens wail and children scream...

Whatever the actual background music to this scene is, I always picture it with Mad World playing. I have to be very careful with this song, because it sums up all the little midnight whispers in my head and hands me a knife with a sad smile. But I think I can post it here.



Yesterday, I (almost) went to go see one of the professors at my partner's college, on her behalf. My partner had been reassured throughout a six-week child care mentoring semester that her performance was just fine and that she would pass - but when her grades came back, they have come back less-than-completely-perfect (which, in the grading system they have set up, is a fail). The stated results in the student booklet she got at the beginning of the year would be her being expelled from the entire program for a full year - having to start over in September 2013 if she even bothered to come back.

Excuse me, no.

She is rightly and understandably upset about this - to the point where she is positive she will not be able to carry on a conversation about it with the professor in charge of coordinating the mentoring placements. I offered - offered freely, mind you - to take this charge on myself. I view it not as a burden, not as something that my partner should handle by her damn self and why should I have to do it - no, rather as a task undertaken out of love and as her champion. I'm frightened by the prospect of arguing with an authority figure in their place of power, where they can cite rules and wave bits of paper and sit there with a sad but sympathetic face and tell me that there's nothing they can do. I'm terrified of confrontation, and the two times this week I've tried psyching myself up to go talk, I felt like I was having a heart attack - full physical panic. But I would do it anyway, because I don't want my partner to experience this. I would do this for her, and save her the distress.

Except I can't. The professor called ahead to get an idea of what the situation actually was, and said that she cannot see me about Phina without Phina present in the room. The rest of the conversation went well, and I'm hoping that I've now prepped the professor with our side of things so that she will be in the mindset of "That's strange, why shouldn't she pass?" rather than "Well, that's what the bit of paper says, so I guess you're screwed.". And there is a certain rightness to my partner at least being there: say I screw something up myself - she should have the chance to jump in, or contradict me, supply more detail, make decisions, whatever. I suppose a champion's battle ought to be watched by the one being contested for. We'll set up a meeting time sometime next week, where all three of us can get together and hammer it out. But it still emphasizes our powerlessness.


I'm taking Sociology at university, as well as Psychology. Most of what I learned in Sociology makes me want to grab the nearest wall and beat my head against it until the pain stops. Joss Whedon (creator of Angel) was right in many ways when he had one of his characters say: Look around. This is the Apocalypse. Read the paper recently? Evil started this race a long freaking time ago, and the tricky thing is that they never actually fired the starting pistol...
There are so many horrible people out there in positions of power. But that's not the really frightening thing. The nauseating part is that there are amorphous, Protean organizations out there that constantly raise new people into thinking that evil and greed are good, or natural, or patriotic, or moral, or unavoidable. What's the quote from 1984?

"WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"

It makes me rage. I hear about a transnational corporation that bullies small countries into creating tax free zones for its factories, so that it can enslave the population to churn out unregulated sh*t to sell at a 90% profit in North America. I hear about a pharmaceutical company buying the FDA so that it can invent a reason to tell its bought doctors to prescribe Oxycontin to children under twelve. I hear that I can try to buy quality alternative brands, but as soon as anything gets popular it gets bought out by PepsiCo, Coca-Cola or Johnson&Johnson. I hear that some untested plastic that's in everything and everyone is a probable cause of some of the spike in autism. I hear another preacher somehow blame gay people for the war in Iraq. I hear that slaves made my shoes. It makes me want to burn everything I've ever purchased and go hide in a hut and raise my own sheep for wool and food. It makes me want to find the SOURCE of all of this sh*t and do some one-time violent act to make it all stop.

The problem is...
How do you kill an organization?
If you kill the people, new people could just flood in to take their places. Besides, most of the people are actually innocent - just following orders, like in Milgram's experiment on obedience.
If you disband the organization, the people could just flee and start new organizations under different names, like metastasizing cancer cells.

If you just try to avoid the organization, it will continue corrupting your government and poisoning your air and water and soil. You can go build your Iron Age village co-op in the north of Saskatchewan and live there happily for twenty years, only to have co-ops banned in year 21 because someone has decided you're a threat to the System.


This post has no answers. Perhaps the next one will have some ideas on what I can do, or at least a listing of the ideas I've gathered.