How We Get There Matters - Ends and Means
Feb. 17th, 2004 11:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
butterflyThis isn't meta and it isn't a rant, it's a personal exploration of my own beliefs. As such, it's less open-ended than I try to be normally - in fandom essays and meta, I prefer asking questions to answering them, but when it comes to my own life, finding answers is important.
My mom works for a company called Tri-Met - it's the Portland-Metro area public transport service. The 'motto' of the company used to be 'how we get there matters'. Recently, it was decided that that was too judgemental and the new motto is 'see where it takes you'. Personally, I preferred the old one.
One of the things that pre-vamped Lawson says is that you don't win a war by any means necessary, you win it by doing the right thing. The ends don't justify the means. This is also what drove Buffy in The Gift: the end of saving the world did not justify the means of killing an innocent girl.
One of the lessons that Buffy tells over and over is that of ends and means. Taking care that while Buffy fights monsters, she doesn't become one.
Can a truly good end justify horrible and cruel means?
The problem lies in priorities. Depending on what a person values, the answer can be yes or no. To Buffy Summers, the world isn't worth saving if the cost is innocent blood. To Rupert Giles, innocent blood is not too high a price to pay for saving the world. In a sense, it's the fight between the forest and the trees - a map of the world versus individual portraits.
Surely saving the world is worth sacrificing a principle or two. A life or two. Yet, I ask, as Buffy did - is a world that asks these choices of people a world worth saving?
Why we fight matters - but so does how. Lawson... after he was vamped, he still fixed the sub - he still had the mission, had his orders, but he'd lost his purpose. He's lost why he was fighting, because he no longer saw that the men are the mission - that they have to be, or the mission is worthless.
One of the reasons that I'm thinking of this is because of the book Ishmael. I've read it twice now - once a couple of years ago, and once just recently. In so many ways, the messages of the book resonates throughout BtVS and AtS.
In my head, I'm always quoting the Jossverse. When it comes to... the world outside my own head, it's Anyanka's words that come to mind - "This is the world we made." It is, after all. The world we live in now is the result of thousands of years of cause and effect. When people wonder why God let something happen, I wonder why they think that it has anything to do with God - free will is a powerful thing and we've been using it for quite some time. So many of the horrible things that people blame on an uncaring deity can be directly traced to the choices that people have made.
In therapy, we were taught that something cannot be changed unless it is claimed. Every single day, billions of people make choices that make this world what it is. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We were born to a wonder of a planet that has more than enough resources to go around. Instead, this is what we choose, over and over. And when we deny our responsibility then we deny ourselves the chance to change things.
Because this is the world that we made. And America is what it is because this is what the people here choose. And I don't exempt myself - I'm just as much a part of the system as anyone else who works a salaried job. I was born into this world and it's hard to see the way out. This culture, this life, is all I've ever been taught.
We don't choose the hand that we're dealt, but we choose how we play - whether or not to go for broke or play it safe. Whether or not to be honest or cheat.
What I'm working towards is a way to get out of this game entirely, find one that I like.
For now, I'm playing the game, because I do like to eat and to have enough money for the fun things in life, but this isn't where I want to be in a year or five.
My mom works for a company called Tri-Met - it's the Portland-Metro area public transport service. The 'motto' of the company used to be 'how we get there matters'. Recently, it was decided that that was too judgemental and the new motto is 'see where it takes you'. Personally, I preferred the old one.
One of the things that pre-vamped Lawson says is that you don't win a war by any means necessary, you win it by doing the right thing. The ends don't justify the means. This is also what drove Buffy in The Gift: the end of saving the world did not justify the means of killing an innocent girl.
One of the lessons that Buffy tells over and over is that of ends and means. Taking care that while Buffy fights monsters, she doesn't become one.
Can a truly good end justify horrible and cruel means?
The problem lies in priorities. Depending on what a person values, the answer can be yes or no. To Buffy Summers, the world isn't worth saving if the cost is innocent blood. To Rupert Giles, innocent blood is not too high a price to pay for saving the world. In a sense, it's the fight between the forest and the trees - a map of the world versus individual portraits.
Surely saving the world is worth sacrificing a principle or two. A life or two. Yet, I ask, as Buffy did - is a world that asks these choices of people a world worth saving?
Why we fight matters - but so does how. Lawson... after he was vamped, he still fixed the sub - he still had the mission, had his orders, but he'd lost his purpose. He's lost why he was fighting, because he no longer saw that the men are the mission - that they have to be, or the mission is worthless.
One of the reasons that I'm thinking of this is because of the book Ishmael. I've read it twice now - once a couple of years ago, and once just recently. In so many ways, the messages of the book resonates throughout BtVS and AtS.
In my head, I'm always quoting the Jossverse. When it comes to... the world outside my own head, it's Anyanka's words that come to mind - "This is the world we made." It is, after all. The world we live in now is the result of thousands of years of cause and effect. When people wonder why God let something happen, I wonder why they think that it has anything to do with God - free will is a powerful thing and we've been using it for quite some time. So many of the horrible things that people blame on an uncaring deity can be directly traced to the choices that people have made.
In therapy, we were taught that something cannot be changed unless it is claimed. Every single day, billions of people make choices that make this world what it is. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We were born to a wonder of a planet that has more than enough resources to go around. Instead, this is what we choose, over and over. And when we deny our responsibility then we deny ourselves the chance to change things.
Because this is the world that we made. And America is what it is because this is what the people here choose. And I don't exempt myself - I'm just as much a part of the system as anyone else who works a salaried job. I was born into this world and it's hard to see the way out. This culture, this life, is all I've ever been taught.
We don't choose the hand that we're dealt, but we choose how we play - whether or not to go for broke or play it safe. Whether or not to be honest or cheat.
What I'm working towards is a way to get out of this game entirely, find one that I like.
For now, I'm playing the game, because I do like to eat and to have enough money for the fun things in life, but this isn't where I want to be in a year or five.