Cerebellar Web Post 35-6457A

15 March 6457
Cerebellar Web Post 35-6457A

Attn: Dr. Pweet
Archaeosociology Department Chair,
Bradbury University
Vallis Marinelles, Mars

Dear Dr. Pweet:

As requested, here is my report of this month's archaeosocial findings from the field study teams on Origin Planet (formerly known as Earth) on the sparsely-populated continent of North America, substation 17, in what was formerly the state of Ohio.

We have managed, through chrono-magnetic reconstruction, to recover some electronic discourse from a discussion medium "social media." These discussions took place on what used to be called a "computer" -- an extremely early form of our cerebellar interfaces. This week we have drawn some startling conclusions about the ancient practices of social and political thinking from the early twenty-first century. Based on the conversations we have re-imaged and analyzed, we have concluded that people were required -- perhaps under threat of imprisonment -- to join one of two sides: either "liberal" or "conservative" viewpoints. Each side seems to have used the other's name as a kind of profanity.

We deduced that they were required to join these factions based on the disproportionately small number of people who seem to have "crossed the line" regarding their philosophies. (A farily common exception to this rule seems to be a rather significant number of people who seem to have held the oxymoronical belief that the killing of fetuses was bad and that the killing of those convicted of crimes was good, or vice-versa. [For reference, you'll forgive me if I remind you that in this epoch of history, people actually did find reasons to take the lives of their fellow humans; some of these reasons even made killing not only lawful but laudable].)

Child Wisdom from To Kill a Mockingbird

Jem and Scout, from the film starring
Gregory Peck

Somehow, I never read To Kill a Mockingbird until now. Go ahead. I'll wait until everyone is done lambasting me. [Looks at sky. Whistles. Bounces up and down on toes. Listens. Waits for a guy in Gdansk to get in his last barbed verbal missile.] But I'm glad.

Experiencing the book, now, as an adult, might be better than having read it, as many of our kids do in the U.S., in the eighth grade. I might have just chalked it up as a good read that I remembered fondly, had I read it then. Now, I am nothing short of in love with the book. As far as I'm concerned, it is just about a perfect novel.

That said, the book is sad, in lots of ways. But, most powerfully, it explores, through the eyes of children (eyes which, sadly, must be opened to such things), the general awfulness and superficiality of people. Of late, and as a consistent theme on Hats and Rabbits, the idea that society and groupthink are bad things has weighed heavily upon my disposition. I feel much as Jem must in this excerpt from the novel, after he and his little sister, Scout, witnessed the unfair trial of Tom Robinson, a black man in the white-dominated Southern town of Maycomb, in 1935. Scout starts: