“Oh, shit,” I worried in my mind, “I didn’t realize we were going to have to tell someone!” I winced as we stood shoulder to shoulder in a long line on the dance studio floor, racking my brain for an alternative story than the one I had chosen for this exercise.
“Now find a partner,” instructs our workshop leader Elizabeth, “And tell your partner your story in one lap across the floor.” Her tiny dancer’s body moved quickly beneath her mass of blond dreadlocks, and she lovingly smiled at our discomfort as we all begin to walk our personal planks.
This past Friday our Truman crew participated in an “Arts and Public Policy Day” at the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. The 9-5 workshop gave us a day off from our jobs, and a chance to explore our own and each other’s creativity and personality through movement exercises, group discussions, role-plays, and interpretive dance. After a session of abstract physical expression, our group was asked to recount a situation in which we had acted unethically and then, in unison, each tell our story out loud and we marched across the studio floor. Easy enough, we reluctantly and collectively agreed: when everyone’s talking, no one is listening, right?
I decided quickly on my most recent feelings of unethical behavior, namely, the time I spend everyday at the Bank corresponding for Keep a Child Alive business, as I feel like our Bank work contributes so little to the big picture of development and poverty relief. Yes, in a bigger picture this is perhaps not unethical, because the positive impact my KCA work is having on poverty relief at our sites outweighs my contributions in my position at the Bank. However in the context of this summer, I feel hypocritical for criticizing the unfocused and unmotivated leadership at the Bank, when I myself am acting unfocused and unmotivated.
DeCarol is my partner, and I firmly cup her left hand in both of mine as I explain to her my dilemma, speaking straight into her attentive eyes. She reciprocates on the stroll back with her story, a tragic tale of never having apologized for a wrongdoing until it was too late. Elizabeth then asked us to assign headlines to each of our stories and come back to join the group in a large circle. “Phew!” I sighed in relief, knowing I held the utmost trust in DeCarol not to ever share my confession that I feared could be so easily misjudged.
Thinking we were moving on to a new exercise, my jaw dropped at Elizabeth’s next line.
“How about those headlines?”
Her eyes smiled devilishly, looking around as a wave of discomfort rippled through our faces. “You can say yours or your partner’s, ready? Who’s first?”
My brain initiated a flurry of thoughts towards an emergency exit strategy. Maybe I can still save myself from this embarrassment!?, I hoped frantically, yes, as long as DeCarol just doesn't…
“Hypocrisy: My Experience at the World Bank”, she proclaimed clearly.
I blinked hard, bit my lip, my heart tightened up, I forced a smile. The entire circle laughed in my general direction, well aware the headline belonged to me, and upon group request, DeCarol retold my tale to the entire group. Busted, I thought, as I tried to mask my shaky spirit with a stolid, calm face. I felt awful for a moment, afraid people would lose their faith in me as the person I try to be; a person of strong character and moral values. I felt concerned the retelling could be misinterpreted, or that all my other work would now be meaningless.
I felt, in short, like Bruce Wayne.
Sitting in the plush seat of an air conditioned movie theater one day later, I stared up at Wayne, Harvey Dent, and The Joker duke it out in a battle to bring ‘true’ justice to Gotham. “You want order in Gotham?” The Joker sneers, “Batman must take off his mask and turn himself in. Everyday he doesn’t, people will die.”
Our Dark Knight wavers upon the fine line between hero and outcast, nearly incapacitated trying to determine how to weigh the immediate tragedies of standing strong with his mask on against the long term consequences of giving into The Joker’s tactics of terrorism and demoralization. (“Does it depress you how alone you really are?” he snickers to Harvey in the hospital) And on top of that, Batman is immersed in personal hypocrisy. He refuses to kill The Joker because of his stated moral code, but keeps his mask on knowing that innocent people are getting killed because of his choice. How ‘ethical’ is that?
I think back to my Bank debacle. Maybe I’m doing my job by not doing my job – breaking the rules in order to create order. The Joker, as anarchic as he is, reveals this paradox of chaos creating order. He questions the incredibly skewed nature of our own purported ‘logical’ perceptions: does it really make ‘ethical’ sense that, as he references, we can accept groups of human soldiers being destroyed but are distressed when a city Commissioner is shot? Does it make ‘ethical’ sense that we knowingly allow thousands of humans to perish everyday from underfunded quick fixes like diarrhea, but mark history when 3,000 people die in a single attack? How orderly is our order? And do I have before me now an advantage working within an institution if I want to fundamentally change the way it functions?
“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
Does becoming the villain indeed bring the positive change? Must we be cast out from an institution in order to give them something to push against? As Batman realizes, if you want to make a real difference, people will hate you. You will have to allow them to chase you and to vilify you, in order for society to have a reason to band together and demand justice, rather than turn yourself in ('ethically'), and watch them crumble under the intimidation of the truly immoral villain.
Maybe the systems and institutions that frustrate us actually have this all figured out, and are in fact promoting positive social change at a grassroots level (i.e. frustrating even its employees to be more satisfied by grassroots work than bureaucratic projects and reports). But more likely, we are facing a slew of institutions fallen to corruption and crime. Either way, there must be at least two different kinds of villains: the Dark Knights and the fallen White Knights. The Batmans and the Two Faces. The deliberate outcasts and the accidental outcasts. Those who are villains as a sacrifice to give people the chance to be good in retaliation, and those who are villains having given in to a greater evil.
We could all use an Alfred in our lives sometimes (although I have one, his name is Dad), someone to answer our rhetorical anxieties when we do not know what role to choose.
I legitimately think Wayne’s worries, every day: “People are dying! What do I do?”
“Endure,” Alfred replies, “You can be the outcast. You can make the choice that no one else will face, the right choice, Gotham needs you.”
“Now find a partner,” instructs our workshop leader Elizabeth, “And tell your partner your story in one lap across the floor.” Her tiny dancer’s body moved quickly beneath her mass of blond dreadlocks, and she lovingly smiled at our discomfort as we all begin to walk our personal planks.
This past Friday our Truman crew participated in an “Arts and Public Policy Day” at the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. The 9-5 workshop gave us a day off from our jobs, and a chance to explore our own and each other’s creativity and personality through movement exercises, group discussions, role-plays, and interpretive dance. After a session of abstract physical expression, our group was asked to recount a situation in which we had acted unethically and then, in unison, each tell our story out loud and we marched across the studio floor. Easy enough, we reluctantly and collectively agreed: when everyone’s talking, no one is listening, right?
I decided quickly on my most recent feelings of unethical behavior, namely, the time I spend everyday at the Bank corresponding for Keep a Child Alive business, as I feel like our Bank work contributes so little to the big picture of development and poverty relief. Yes, in a bigger picture this is perhaps not unethical, because the positive impact my KCA work is having on poverty relief at our sites outweighs my contributions in my position at the Bank. However in the context of this summer, I feel hypocritical for criticizing the unfocused and unmotivated leadership at the Bank, when I myself am acting unfocused and unmotivated.
DeCarol is my partner, and I firmly cup her left hand in both of mine as I explain to her my dilemma, speaking straight into her attentive eyes. She reciprocates on the stroll back with her story, a tragic tale of never having apologized for a wrongdoing until it was too late. Elizabeth then asked us to assign headlines to each of our stories and come back to join the group in a large circle. “Phew!” I sighed in relief, knowing I held the utmost trust in DeCarol not to ever share my confession that I feared could be so easily misjudged.
Thinking we were moving on to a new exercise, my jaw dropped at Elizabeth’s next line.
“How about those headlines?”
Her eyes smiled devilishly, looking around as a wave of discomfort rippled through our faces. “You can say yours or your partner’s, ready? Who’s first?”
My brain initiated a flurry of thoughts towards an emergency exit strategy. Maybe I can still save myself from this embarrassment!?, I hoped frantically, yes, as long as DeCarol just doesn't…
“Hypocrisy: My Experience at the World Bank”, she proclaimed clearly.
I blinked hard, bit my lip, my heart tightened up, I forced a smile. The entire circle laughed in my general direction, well aware the headline belonged to me, and upon group request, DeCarol retold my tale to the entire group. Busted, I thought, as I tried to mask my shaky spirit with a stolid, calm face. I felt awful for a moment, afraid people would lose their faith in me as the person I try to be; a person of strong character and moral values. I felt concerned the retelling could be misinterpreted, or that all my other work would now be meaningless.
I felt, in short, like Bruce Wayne.
Sitting in the plush seat of an air conditioned movie theater one day later, I stared up at Wayne, Harvey Dent, and The Joker duke it out in a battle to bring ‘true’ justice to Gotham. “You want order in Gotham?” The Joker sneers, “Batman must take off his mask and turn himself in. Everyday he doesn’t, people will die.”
Our Dark Knight wavers upon the fine line between hero and outcast, nearly incapacitated trying to determine how to weigh the immediate tragedies of standing strong with his mask on against the long term consequences of giving into The Joker’s tactics of terrorism and demoralization. (“Does it depress you how alone you really are?” he snickers to Harvey in the hospital) And on top of that, Batman is immersed in personal hypocrisy. He refuses to kill The Joker because of his stated moral code, but keeps his mask on knowing that innocent people are getting killed because of his choice. How ‘ethical’ is that?
I think back to my Bank debacle. Maybe I’m doing my job by not doing my job – breaking the rules in order to create order. The Joker, as anarchic as he is, reveals this paradox of chaos creating order. He questions the incredibly skewed nature of our own purported ‘logical’ perceptions: does it really make ‘ethical’ sense that, as he references, we can accept groups of human soldiers being destroyed but are distressed when a city Commissioner is shot? Does it make ‘ethical’ sense that we knowingly allow thousands of humans to perish everyday from underfunded quick fixes like diarrhea, but mark history when 3,000 people die in a single attack? How orderly is our order? And do I have before me now an advantage working within an institution if I want to fundamentally change the way it functions?
“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
Does becoming the villain indeed bring the positive change? Must we be cast out from an institution in order to give them something to push against? As Batman realizes, if you want to make a real difference, people will hate you. You will have to allow them to chase you and to vilify you, in order for society to have a reason to band together and demand justice, rather than turn yourself in ('ethically'), and watch them crumble under the intimidation of the truly immoral villain.
Maybe the systems and institutions that frustrate us actually have this all figured out, and are in fact promoting positive social change at a grassroots level (i.e. frustrating even its employees to be more satisfied by grassroots work than bureaucratic projects and reports). But more likely, we are facing a slew of institutions fallen to corruption and crime. Either way, there must be at least two different kinds of villains: the Dark Knights and the fallen White Knights. The Batmans and the Two Faces. The deliberate outcasts and the accidental outcasts. Those who are villains as a sacrifice to give people the chance to be good in retaliation, and those who are villains having given in to a greater evil.
We could all use an Alfred in our lives sometimes (although I have one, his name is Dad), someone to answer our rhetorical anxieties when we do not know what role to choose.
I legitimately think Wayne’s worries, every day: “People are dying! What do I do?”
“Endure,” Alfred replies, “You can be the outcast. You can make the choice that no one else will face, the right choice, Gotham needs you.”
2 comments:
You shouldn't be afraid of what anyone else thinks of you anyways. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions as human beings, so why not voice them? Take it from me, your cynical views of the Bank shouldn't bring you down or make you feel like you aren't appreciating the opportunity, sometimes believe it or not, things just plain old suck, or aren't right, and no one says you have to put up with them without making a fuss.
You are almost done, remember that.
as cynical as the joker is in this movie, as much as he tries to create chaos, he does give gotham a chance to really analyze the meaning of 'true' justice. i agree that your situation is comprable at a certain level to bruce wayne's predicament and i'm pleased at your ability to understand that despite those feelings of hypocrisy, sometimes you do have to take the proverbial fall in order to inspire and unite society. although, i don't believe anybody who knows you sees you as a hypocrite for the work you have been doing this summer. but, like batman, there are many who don't fully understand the predicament you are in or the decisions you make, but don't waste time worrying about that. just carry on...can't please everybody all the time!! LOVE YOU
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