Today is a big day for my son. It is his 11th birthday, and it is his last day of elementary school. His school held a "moving up"/graduation ceremony yesterday. As they were calling up kids to get special awards, I started to worry how he would feel if he got nothing. My son is very smart, but he daydreams like no one else. He needs focus and organization without a doubt. I would have hated if he felt that there was a ceiling to his abilities. Yet he won and award for computer class. I was really happy, but also relieved that he received solid affirmation of his abilities (strangely, he and his buddies were the only boys to get awards in academic subjects.)
We let him open some presents early and took him to his favorite restaurant. Late last night, after everyone else was asleep, I look for a Trek episode to watch. I threw on Nor the Battle to the Strong. I know some people dislike the episode because it shows a type of cowardly behavior that they don't think should exist in Roddenberry's 24th century. I've seen it as, first, an episode about how people face war and, second, a father worrying about his son. It was in the light of the latter that I decided to watch it.
What I hadn't appreciated enough before was the story about Jake maturing. On its surface, the title is about facing war and violence, and how what makes one a hero might arise from the same motivations that might also make one a coward. But the Biblical verse from which it is drawn is more about the futility of trying to control our fate in absolute turns. As the Yiddish saying goes, "Man plans, but God laughs." The episode revolves around Jake's own misperceptions, his desire to fit the things happening around him into a tidy story in which right and wrong are clearly defined and greatness derives from the character of the individual. The story--the mature story--he finally tells is one about his experiences, not the tropes he wants to affirm. All this is not to say that I should not prepare my son, to help him with lessons, but not to see the course of his life in terms of those lessons. He will fail, succeed, and grow in ways I cannot predict.
We let him open some presents early and took him to his favorite restaurant. Late last night, after everyone else was asleep, I look for a Trek episode to watch. I threw on Nor the Battle to the Strong. I know some people dislike the episode because it shows a type of cowardly behavior that they don't think should exist in Roddenberry's 24th century. I've seen it as, first, an episode about how people face war and, second, a father worrying about his son. It was in the light of the latter that I decided to watch it.
What I hadn't appreciated enough before was the story about Jake maturing. On its surface, the title is about facing war and violence, and how what makes one a hero might arise from the same motivations that might also make one a coward. But the Biblical verse from which it is drawn is more about the futility of trying to control our fate in absolute turns. As the Yiddish saying goes, "Man plans, but God laughs." The episode revolves around Jake's own misperceptions, his desire to fit the things happening around him into a tidy story in which right and wrong are clearly defined and greatness derives from the character of the individual. The story--the mature story--he finally tells is one about his experiences, not the tropes he wants to affirm. All this is not to say that I should not prepare my son, to help him with lessons, but not to see the course of his life in terms of those lessons. He will fail, succeed, and grow in ways I cannot predict.
