When you find yourself in the singing, you should remember that will make you a dissident. There is a funny myth that runs through the American life. It is the myth that allows us all to be the lone wolf hero of the story. There is a movie called District 9 which does a beautiful job confronting this myth. On the surface, this movie is straight sci-fi, and perhaps a poor sample in that the technology and action are a bit less exciting and futuristic than those in Avatar.
Beneath the surface, however, is the fact that the story of District 9 is not really fiction at all. The film creates a division between us and them that is very clear. The aliens are as disgusting as anything you will find in Ridley Scott's imagination. They are insectile and have social systems that defy human analysis. The humans, in contrast, are as human as your neighbors. They have bad teeth, cheap clothes and have fairly insignificant careers. The important characters don't end up being the CEO's and warriors of power myths. They are a lot more like me.
My point: the watcher should have no problem feeling disgust and terror at the aliens, and empathy and power while identifying with the protagonist. This doesn't happen. Instead, when I saw the living situation of the aliens, I saw the very real images from a Sudan refugee camp of 80,000 people I had seen the weekend before. I saw the mountainous pile of trash at a Honduran landfill where a church sits and children sift the refuse for recyclable and valuable salvage items which they sell to men in trucks at the end of a day. I was all to uncomfortably aware that the "over the top" oppression under which the aliens lived is an actual reality in the lives of many millions of human beings right now, and the discomfort I felt was amplified by the inescapable fact that we don't even need the pretense of "other" to perpetrate unspeakable violence against those that are not our family.
The other thing the movie does, is it makes you be the humans. The protagonist, like any great character, is complicated. He makes poor decisions from terrible prejudice and narrow greed. Then he turns around and does something incredibly loving and rather sweet. He is a small and unimportant person-a cog in the machine, and I can't escape the fact that he is me.
When faced with real choices that may cost, I very greatly fear I would make the kinds of decisions he made: selfish, small, and decidedly unheroic. What's more, as the decisions he makes to try and do "the right thing" start to cost him his family, his friends, his whole social network and support system, he wants to go back. He doesn't want to be heroic and lonely. He wants to be safe and unimportant. He never actually fully "joins the resistance." Right up to the last, if those that were persecuting him would have stopped, he would have turned against the aliens in a moment. He never actually cared for anyone other than himself, and integrity was more expensive than he could afford.
Unlike many of our stories, District 9 gives you a taste of what acting differently from the norm really feels like.
That is what I mean when I say that being in the singing will make you a dissident. You will find you no longer agree with the messages and purposes of things around you. You will become aware of injustice and oppression where you least expected to see it, and the moment you start to act in a different way, your crowd will let you know. They will put pressure on you not to change. They will not secretly cheer you on or hold your hand. You will find yourself separated and alone, and decisions will become complicated with dubious rewards. You will want to find confirmation that your choices are right, but you won't be able to.
Singing is a work of honesty. We cannot truly sing lies. They lack the appropriate power. I just feel like I should warn you. The spirit married to the soul is life, and life sustained on the breath is song, but
real songs scar us. They ask too much, push too hard, and require vulnerability that the world will exploit. Singing is not safe, but, to paraphrase my friend C.S. Lewis, it is good.
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