Amalgam of mediocrity
Terry’s disenchantment with the Walkers Program. (Find the part about the Tricky Sticks.)
Terry and his Monitor were just passing through the lobby of the Walkers Building when they heard a commotion coming from the coffeehouse. A man was raving incoherently. Customers cowered to get away. Terry stood frozen with a deer in the headlights expression as the Monitor strode forward to stand between the lunatic and the clump of bystanders. He stretched out his arm indicating the door to the street and said calmly, “The door is this way.”
The lunatic turned to face the intruder, but was met with the (calm) determination of another man a good bit larger and taller; face, voice, and arm tuned to the exit.
The lunatic shouted, “Don’t touch me, man!”
But the Monitor hardly blinked, his attention glued to the exit door. “Right this way,” he repeated softly.
The Lunatic began to back off, toward the door, even as he continued his threatening rant. The Monitor followed a couple of feet behind. The lunatic shouted, “Don’t you follow me! Don’t follow me, man!”
They reached the door and the Monitor simply said, “Outside. Outside is good.” He was the only other person in the room who had moved to confront the man. He came back to where Terry was standing, gestured in their original direction, and said, “Now, what were we talking about again?”
But Terry seemed frozen in place. He sputtered for a beat and then managed to speak coherently. “Why didn’t you (subdue) him?”
The Monitor again motioned them forward before anyone else could fully register the rapidity with which the circumstance had suddenly mushroomed and then subsided. Once the two began moving again, the Monitor said, “You’ve heard it before. With power comes responsibility. Just because you have the sticks and the power and the skill to use them to subdue a threat does not mean that they are the best method to solve a problem. Think about it: if I had put the man down, the police would come, they’d ask all sorts of questions, throw the lunatic into a cell, and you and I would lose all that valuable time that we could otherwise spend doing something useful. Sometimes injecting a little calm into a situation and be more effective than proving to ourselves that we are the more powerful.”
Terry was incredulous. “He might have had a knife, or a gun. You could have been killed!”
“I was looking at the door, but my attention was completely focused on what he was going to do next. I had to be vigilant and focused on my objective: get the man outside away from the people. In that I succeeded.”
“But he’s out in the streets! What’s to keep him from threatening someone else?”
“Ah, but you see, that’s where clarity of objective comes in. We’ve discussed this. You must learn to be quick and to clearly identify your attainable objective without becoming distracted by other concerns. You do that by simplifying the circumstance as much as you can. I wanted him out the door. He might calm down in a little while, or come down from whatever had him agitated. At the very least, he’s someone else’s problem now. If he had pulled a knife, that would have altered the circumstance. But he didn’t pull a knife, so to act as if he had would have only muddled the situation and led me to an incorrect response. Remember: responsibility is the ability to respond. We have choices; we have many paths to choose from. We seek the best path, but can live with one that is good enough.”
Terry wasn’t satisfied. His blood lust was up. He saw the opportunity of the moment differently; the chance to exercise his budding skills in real life, to subdue a lunatic who had been threatening an innocent group of people. He wanted to feel his stick upon the head of the man the way a baseball meets the bat. He wanted to have that wonderful feeling of hitting a home run and winning the game. It wouldn’t hurt that he would be the hero, and might have even gotten his picture in the paper. Women would look at him differently; as the protector, their savior, the man on the white horse who would save them from the monsters of the sea.
He’d answered the siren call of the Walkers Program because he saw in it an opportunity for growth and change. He naturally wanted to burst forth from the confines of mediocrity that had encased his life like a cocoon, a spidery fabric, impenetrable to flailing arms and struggling limbs. His previous life before the Walkers had been confused, frustrated, and futile. He wanted more. He needed more. He just wanted a chance to prove himself.
He had stuck with the Program for over a year but he didn’t feel any closer to feeling satisfied and fulfilled than when he’d first begun his training. Every spare dollar he earned went into one training session after another. He’d begun having second thoughts – negative feedback, his Monitor would have called it – that he’d been tricked by the smile of that pretty young woman who approached him on the street with that delicious offer: “Would you like to do something interesting and exciting? It will only take a few minutes.” He followed her into a low brick building off the beaten path with no idea of what was to come next. He was intrigued and excited at the imagined possibilities. They sat together in a small room at a table facing an older man. She touched his arm as she introduced him as someone she knew and trusted. He should listen to him for a few minutes and they would meet afterwords and talk.
Moth. Flame. Intersections.
He’d begun to wonder if he’d been trapped in a web of deceit that was at one time a promise of bigger and better things, but was eventually revealed to be nothing more than a fiction, an aberration, an idea whose very identity was nothing more than random words tied together haphazardly and mistaken for philosophy.
thermodynamics of ideas 