Matrix Pills

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.....You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up and believe...whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill.....you stay in wonderland...and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Morpheus, The Matrix


I sit here alone, in my house, in the dark and I wonder. I wonder what is going on in the world and I wonder what we are doing about it. Or for it. I wonder why humans seem to have an innate ability... perhaps even a need... to hurt and dismantle and cause pain. I have just finished watching the Matrix for the second or third time. Let me clarify... I have just finished watching the 2nd half of the 2nd movie of the Matrix Trilogy. I watched the 2nd half of the 3rd movie a few weeks ago. I always seem to be "catching" the 2nd half on some movie channel or other. Which makes me wonder... why am I seeing the 2nd half? What is it about the first half and, indeed, the first movie that I am missing? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything.

I have heard that gas prices are going to continue to go up and up and up, possibly reaching $5 by the summer. I shake my head at this thought. Incomprehensible but yet, the reality is that it is not impossible. It is plausible, in fact. And scary and heart-breaking in a strange, mixed-up fractal time warp way. My husband, who is a rather staunch conservative (at least in the political arena), stated out loud that he believed George W. Bush allowed the complete desecration of tried and true governmental systems for his own personal gains. In other words, he didn't stop the oil leak early enough to save the engine and now, we, his subordinates are paying for his mistakes. Literally. Money in his pocket equals money out of ours. This idea disturbs me greatly. But it should not surprise me. Even though it does.

I should not be surprised because, I think, our society is built on the concept of stepping on others in order to move upward and outward. And it starts early. Today my daughter informed me that she wanted to change her name because some boy at school told her that he didn't like it. This is but the latest in a string of stories of children giving her grief about her clothes and poking her or some other silly social harassment. To us, as adults, these issues seem trivial. But I can see a little glimmer of unease in the way, deep down depths of my daughter's eyes and it worries me. This is where it begins, where the protective shell, the cultural mask is born. Should I allow the continuance of its development? Having slowly and steadily ripped off my shell, my mask for the past ten years, my initial gut reaction is "No!" But societal wisdom says differently.

"Kids will be kids." That is what her pre-school teacher told me when I first broached this issue with her. But I think that is a cop out. A lazy man's way of allowing this kind of aggression to continue. If we set boundaries on this behavior, it would stop. It might take years or decades or eons but, I think... I hope... it would go away. Unless, of course, it is hard-wired into the human brain ~ this need for suffering and imperfection and pain, a la the first two matrix models. Too perfect for humans to accept. No opportunity to fu** up our lives by choosing the baser actions.

When I was a ninth grade English teacher, I had a boy in one of my classes. I don't remember his name but I remember his face and his story. He was smaller than most of the other boys and quiet. Super quiet. Quiet like the silence before an atom bomb explosion. He was so withdrawn and introverted that it was painful to see him. He wore all black and had a spiky black haircut. He wore glasses, I think, and was good at creative things at school. Short stories. Creative essays. Word association. He had friends but he gave off that "loner vibe." One day, in the early Spring, he brought a knife to school and he showed it to one of the girls in his class. He did not wield it and threaten anyone with it. He simply took it out and showcased it in an attempt, no doubt, to boost his flagging self-esteem. And he was caught and expelled. Promptly. No questions asked in the post-Columbine public school paradigm.

A few days after he was expelled, I happened to be in the front office when his mother walked in. She was distraught, as you can imagine, and, seeing me, she stopped to talk with me. I briefly outlined the work we were doing in class (since she would be home-schooling him for the rest of the year) and she nodded mutely, head down. Then she looked up at me, tears brimming under her eyelashes, and she asked me if everything would be alright. Surprised and not a little shocked, I told her that her son was bright and would do fine, that, undoubtedly, he would make it into a college, if he so chose. And she told me that her son used to be a bright, happy, smiling boy as a child and that he had changed over time. Slipping away from her and her husband. Becoming someone else. And she thought that maybe, just maybe, being out of the school system would be good for him. I gave her what assurances I could because, of course, no one really knows the future, and we parted. I never saw her again but our conversation stayed irrevocably burned into my mind. Not every situation is right for every child.

As a high school teacher, I made it a point to promote equality in the classroom and to create a positive environment for everybody in the room. With that in mind, I implemented the apologize policy. If anyone bad-mouthed, put down, or "dissed," any other person in the room, class stopped. Activity ended and we all waited. We waited for an apology to be issued. Two little words ~ "I apologize." That's it. And once they were said, class continued as before. The first couple of times I implemented the apologize policy, the kids couldn't believe it. They thought I would cave in and continue class without the apology. They were wrong. They always apologized. And, before long, they began to monitor their words and actions in my class. Verbally slam another student and you would be called to task for it. By the end of the year, I had kids saying sorry before I even had to stop the class. It simply became habit. It simply became habit to care for the feelings of another human being.

And so I return to the Matrix, to those few computer viruses, those Zion-dwellers, that want to change the big machine, the status quo, the gears that rotate our world. It is not by accident that the Wachowski brothers chose the name Zion. Nor is it by accident that the movies are littered with mythological names and phrases, aside from the very intense mythological themes. Niobe. Nebuchadnezzar. Morpheus. Trinity. These are names that resonate inside the very cells of our beings. Their stories have endured. They are a part of our consciousness and, as such, mean more than we can even imagine. And so, as we connect to these revolutionaries, some would say saviors, on an intrinsic, legendary level... what are they saying to us? What are they saying about us? What side of the fight are we on? Are we entrenched in the machine, living a lie that we know is wrong but unable, unwilling, to do anything about it? Or are we fighting, scraping, bleeding, dying for what we know is right. For our truth, which is all we can truly acknowledge in this life.

Which pill are you going to take?