From the lecture notes - 4
ftln 4
“A meteorite has landed, the Sharks are running wild in town, you kids are wandering around, and, I’m hungry…I hate my job!”
It’s a cop who says that, so I don’t know, maybe some of you in the audience today would want to say, ‘Yeah, I hate your job, too’. It’s really something, when I think about all the stuff some of you have seen with your own eyes, every day, outside your front door, on the street. Some of you have had run-ins with the police, and I’m not talking about a traffic ticket.
This cop comes across as an individual, I think. It is one of the strengths of the game that its dialogue and descriptions have such personality, immediately tangible personality. But to stick to the cop and what we were talking about before: he comes across as an individual, and when you think about your problems with cops, it would be a mistake not to make things personal. Let me explain that.
The police are an institution. They’re part of the government, local, state, or national—institutions ungodly big. You may, when you think about all the problems you’ve had to deal with, trying to get decent food or medicine, to get to the grocery store or the bus stop safely—you maybe want to blame these kinds of vague forces, these institutions, for the injustice and the downright danger you face in your life. These institutions, these things, are faceless themselves, you wish they had one so you could punch it, but instead they just send you endless forms, pieces of paper that somehow have become important enough that your property, your welfare, your life depends upon them. And when you do see someone, some actual human being, representing these institutions, it’s never a good thing. They’re there to evict you, to bring you in for questioning, and you have the right to remain silent, they say; they say, trying to calm you down, it’s nothing personal.
Then you have positive institutions. You have your church, maybe; your school, which you might not like: it means well but needs more money, better teachers, that the other institution, the government, won’t provide. You have an organization like the Southeast Youth Center, that has kindly invited me to speak to you today. Now I want you to focus on this last one. Look at the person sitting next to you. It might be your friend, it might be one of the counselors. It might be someone you just know to see, someone you’ve never seen, someone you hate their guts and it’s plain bad luck you have to sit next to them this long, why won’t the boring old man hurry up so you can go already? It might be that boy or that girl you like. That’s your own business. Do you get what I’m saying? It is personal.
This institution—no, let’s keep calling it an organization, it sounds better—is trying to help every one of you: to do better in school, to make friends, to be smart, to be safe. Wouldn’t it be preposterous if your counselor, after he helped you with your homework or played you one on one, took your thanks and told you, ‘It’s nothing personal’. And it’s not just the adults; each one of you is helping each other learn and grow. Whether you get in a fight or go on a date, you know it’s personal.
I’m not telling you to do either one of those things with a police officer, much less with your congressman. Can you even imagine…But look, what I’m saying is, the principle is the same. You keep in mind that the cop is just doing his job, sure, but not the way a machine does, the way a person does: because he loves it or he hates it, or with bursts of both emotions, with distractions, with prejudices and high-mindedness, doing the best he can or the least necessary to get home to his family or to his dinner…He’s as complicated as you are. And if you respect that, you go a good way towards showing him you’re the same. You start to realize that you’re not alone, not isolated by yourself or in a gang, with everything else oppression you know too well and well-being you’re locked away from; inhuman forces, and you and yours the only thing left that’s real—no. You start to realize that it’s not institutions but they’re made up of individuals. Society you can think of as meaning the biggest institution of all, replete with intransigent ills: atomic bombs, racism—great white Sharks or maniac cults. But maybe you’ll start to think of it as just a word for enough people who believe in the person sitting next to them, who know that person is real. Not a machine, not the ghost of a machine, but a person, whose dealings with us can only be personal. A person also confused, but working his way down from the thin air, to the town, to you kids…and to what we all have in common, hunger at once a metaphor and the furthest thing from it, hunger of our hearts and simple hunger of our guts.
“Oh, she’s warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.”
[‘kids wandering around’ in the back corridors that have a sort of reality as long as society is taken to be a real thing with walls and edges: this is moonside again, and childishness]
ftln 4
“A meteorite has landed, the Sharks are running wild in town, you kids are wandering around, and, I’m hungry…I hate my job!”
It’s a cop who says that, so I don’t know, maybe some of you in the audience today would want to say, ‘Yeah, I hate your job, too’. It’s really something, when I think about all the stuff some of you have seen with your own eyes, every day, outside your front door, on the street. Some of you have had run-ins with the police, and I’m not talking about a traffic ticket.
This cop comes across as an individual, I think. It is one of the strengths of the game that its dialogue and descriptions have such personality, immediately tangible personality. But to stick to the cop and what we were talking about before: he comes across as an individual, and when you think about your problems with cops, it would be a mistake not to make things personal. Let me explain that.
The police are an institution. They’re part of the government, local, state, or national—institutions ungodly big. You may, when you think about all the problems you’ve had to deal with, trying to get decent food or medicine, to get to the grocery store or the bus stop safely—you maybe want to blame these kinds of vague forces, these institutions, for the injustice and the downright danger you face in your life. These institutions, these things, are faceless themselves, you wish they had one so you could punch it, but instead they just send you endless forms, pieces of paper that somehow have become important enough that your property, your welfare, your life depends upon them. And when you do see someone, some actual human being, representing these institutions, it’s never a good thing. They’re there to evict you, to bring you in for questioning, and you have the right to remain silent, they say; they say, trying to calm you down, it’s nothing personal.
Then you have positive institutions. You have your church, maybe; your school, which you might not like: it means well but needs more money, better teachers, that the other institution, the government, won’t provide. You have an organization like the Southeast Youth Center, that has kindly invited me to speak to you today. Now I want you to focus on this last one. Look at the person sitting next to you. It might be your friend, it might be one of the counselors. It might be someone you just know to see, someone you’ve never seen, someone you hate their guts and it’s plain bad luck you have to sit next to them this long, why won’t the boring old man hurry up so you can go already? It might be that boy or that girl you like. That’s your own business. Do you get what I’m saying? It is personal.
This institution—no, let’s keep calling it an organization, it sounds better—is trying to help every one of you: to do better in school, to make friends, to be smart, to be safe. Wouldn’t it be preposterous if your counselor, after he helped you with your homework or played you one on one, took your thanks and told you, ‘It’s nothing personal’. And it’s not just the adults; each one of you is helping each other learn and grow. Whether you get in a fight or go on a date, you know it’s personal.
I’m not telling you to do either one of those things with a police officer, much less with your congressman. Can you even imagine…But look, what I’m saying is, the principle is the same. You keep in mind that the cop is just doing his job, sure, but not the way a machine does, the way a person does: because he loves it or he hates it, or with bursts of both emotions, with distractions, with prejudices and high-mindedness, doing the best he can or the least necessary to get home to his family or to his dinner…He’s as complicated as you are. And if you respect that, you go a good way towards showing him you’re the same. You start to realize that you’re not alone, not isolated by yourself or in a gang, with everything else oppression you know too well and well-being you’re locked away from; inhuman forces, and you and yours the only thing left that’s real—no. You start to realize that it’s not institutions but they’re made up of individuals. Society you can think of as meaning the biggest institution of all, replete with intransigent ills: atomic bombs, racism—great white Sharks or maniac cults. But maybe you’ll start to think of it as just a word for enough people who believe in the person sitting next to them, who know that person is real. Not a machine, not the ghost of a machine, but a person, whose dealings with us can only be personal. A person also confused, but working his way down from the thin air, to the town, to you kids…and to what we all have in common, hunger at once a metaphor and the furthest thing from it, hunger of our hearts and simple hunger of our guts.
“Oh, she’s warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.”
[‘kids wandering around’ in the back corridors that have a sort of reality as long as society is taken to be a real thing with walls and edges: this is moonside again, and childishness]
