Three Words

The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope.

Winston Churchill (2012). “Churchill: The Power of Words”, p.549, Da Capo Press

While others shout of war’s disaster

Oh, we won’t give in

Let’s go living in the past

Jethro Tull, Living in the Past, 1969

I don’t often quote Wikipedia, but, in its article for ‘Three Words’, it describes Absalom as ‘the former leader of a doomsday UFO “group”. It seems a rather succinct way to describe such a complex character.
For once, the irony is quite subtle because not much is made of it.
Absalom ‘predicted there would be an alien invasion at the Millennium.’ As he himself notes, it turns out he was right. As so many are not!
The question is whether Absalom’s group were a ‘doomsday’ cult? It seems, in ‘DeadAlive’ and ‘Three Words’ that rather than merely succumbing to the invasion, Absalom intended to resist. There is certainly no reason to think that Absalom’s group is a ‘Heaven’s Gate’ in waiting. After all, those returnees that he and Jeremiah Smith manage to find don’t become the super soldiers they were intended to become.
Absalom, as with his namesake, King David’s third son, is a man with a keen sense of what is right. It is unfortunate for him that ‘right’ is not a welcome commodity in the modern world – if ever it was! And, like that Biblical figure, he is willing to put his life on the line for his belief. Absalom, even before Scully and Doggett, is fighting the future.
There are always three options:
Escape to the past. Live the present. Fight the Future.
There’s probably a bestselling pop psychology book right there. Everything is typed.
As much as I love Jethro Tull, I cannot accept their escape route to the past. Churchill, as history shows, was right when he said that the past is no more than a source of hope. When we consider all that has been, all that we have survived, all that we have transcended, how can we not find hope in our past?
Is our present any better than the present of any other point in history? There was a present in which Britain was a great nation, just as there was, in the mind of most Americans, a present in which America was more than it is now. A talking-head, on MSNBC, recently, talking about the current President, began to say that he is the leader of the greatest nation on Earth, but checked himself and changed what he was saying to the President being the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth. The present is never what we want it to be.
The past we have no control over; the present is disappointing; only the future holds out hope. Maybe, just maybe, one day, we will be all that we can be.
The mistake the Syndicate made was giving up on that hope. They looked upon humanity and despaired. Mulder and Scully, though often beaten down by all that they had to endure, never gave up on the hope for a future in which we are not merely playthings of forces greater than ourselves. Always, they retained the faith that our future was to be determined by ourselves.
The #MeToo movement is fighting the future.
Fighting the future means making this world a place where we can all live lives of value, appreciated for our being, celebrated for our differences.
Peace does not mean an easy life without concern. Peace means I have the freedom to be as different from you as I wish to be without our having to fight. Peace means recognizing, rather than denigrating, that man or woman who sweeps the streets, keeping our cities free of disease. Recognising and appreciating that those people who labour in thankless jobs are the very ones who enable the rest of us to live the lives we do.
Fighting the future is a fight for humanity. And if humanity is not your ideal, you are no better than the Syndicate that sold us out to an alien race for no reason other than you are too scared to be what you are.