To Be Free Is Free to Be
My provocation is this: utopia is not the place to go looking for freedom. At least not the right kind of freedom. Ironically, I think, we should examine that which is so often associated with oppression, submission, and silence—dystopia.
The idea for this paper came to me a year ago while watching an episode of Caprica, a spin-off of Battlestar Galactica. Here, Tad (gamertag: Hercules) turns to Tamara and says:
“Look, I know this must seem really random to you, but this game—it really does mean something to me. It actually allows me to be something.”
Without pausing she fires back:
“Maybe if you weren’t in here playing this game you could be something out there, too.”
I think this exchange points to an interesting way in which the relationship between youth and the world is often cast: youth are dreamers and cultivate their online selves at the expense of their real lives. But I think that this distinction between virtual and real is growing false and that the development of youth’s relationship with the intangible has everything to do with their relationship to the real.
Truth be told, this is actually my favorite episode of the series and it takes its name from a poem, “There Is Another Sky”:
There is another sky
Ever serene and fair
And there is another sunshine
Though it be darkness there
Never mind faded forests, Austin
Never mind silent fields
Here is a little forest
Whose leaf is evergreen
Here is a brighter garden
Where not a frost has been
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum
Prithee, my brother
Into my garden come!
All of this from a woman who would never see the garden for herself.
But that’s sort of exactly the point, right? I mean, Dickinson and Tad are my people—they are the ones who are mired in the dark and they are the ones searching for a light, something more, something better. Something like a utopia.
And what is Dickinson’s garden, really, other than a form of utopia? Hearing those words, we picture a pastoral safe haven that is admittedly different from the technological utopias that we’ve been discussing in class but definitely a vision for a world that is better.
The trouble is that our utopias rarely come alone: utopias are born out of dystopias, slide into dystopia, and maintain a healthy tension by threatening to turn into dystopias. As I’ve thought about this over the course of the semester, I have come to wonder if all utopias are in fact false for one person’s utopia is easily another’s dystopia. So we have this back and forth that is, as we have seen, instructive, but I’m most interested in the scenarios like those in Nineteen Eighty-Four and A Brave New World wherein an established utopia sets the scene for what has become a dystopian nightmare.
Somewhat like the life of a teenager. Tyler Clementi was perhaps the most high-profile case in a string of gay teen suicides that occurred in the fall of last year. At the time, I can remember being incredibly upset—not at Dharun, Clementi’s roommate—but at myself and my colleagues. “This death is, in part, on all of us,” I remember telling my peers for these are the kids that we are supposed to be advocating for and we’ve failed to change the culture that causes these things to happen. We’ve known about bullying in schools for a long time and we can make steps to alter that but we can also work to make youth more resilient.
Looking to do just that, columnist Dan Savage started a project called “It Gets Better” that attempted to convince gay youth to stick around because, well, “it gets better.” Once the initial goodwill wore off, I began to get increasingly upset at the project—not because the intent was unworthy but rather because the project showed a certain lack of understanding and compassion for those it was actually trying to help.
Telling a teenager that things will get better somehow, someday is like telling him that things will get better in an eternity because every day is like a million years. Telling a teenager your story means that you are not listening to theirs. And what about all those youth who don’t feel like they can tough it out until they can leave? They feel like failures. What you’re really after with this whole thing is hope, but I think that the efforts are misguided.
I was frustrated because this position caused youth to be passive bystanders in their own lives—that one day, they’d wake up or go off to college and things would magically get better. There might be some truth to that but what about all of the challenges that youth have yet to face? Life is hard—for everyone—and it’ll kick you while you’re down; but we need to teach our youth not to be afraid to get back up because the wrong lesson to learn from all of this is to become closed off and cynical.
So what are some of the ways that we can take a look at young adult culture and reexamine the activities that youth are already engaged in, in order to tell young people that they are valued just as they are?
For me, Young Adult fiction provides a great space in which to talk about themes of utopia/dystopia, depression, and bullying. So much more than Twilight, there was recently a discussion over this past summer on Twitter with participants employing the hash tag #YASaves. The topic was sparked in response to claims that the material in Young Adult fiction was too dark. Case in point, The Hunger Games centers on an event wherein 24 teenagers fight to the death in an arena. And I say this with the caveat that I am not a parent but I get that position—I really do. Years of interacting with parents and their children in the arena of college admission has convinced me that many parents want the best for their kids—they want to protect them from harm—but simply approach the process in a way that I do not find helpful.
Although “freedom from” represents a necessary pre-condition, it would seem that a true(r) sense of agency is the province of “freedom to.” And yet much of the rhetoric surrounding the current state of politics seems to center around the former as we talk fervently about liberation from dictatorships in the Middle East during the spring of 2011 or freedom from oppressive government in the United States. And these sound like good things, right? But here those dystopias born out of utopias are instructive for they show us what happens when “freedom from” collapses. Like “It Gets Better” which forwards its own vision of a life free from bullying, the dream rots because “freedom from” leads to a utopia—a space that, by its very nature, has no exit plan.
But, to be fair, perhaps “freedom to” has a stigma, one that Dan Savage is likely familiar with.
I imagine that there is a certain amount of disillusionment with this for “Free to Be…You and Me” has not really altered the perception that boys can have dolls or that it’s okay to cry. We are not yet truly free to be. But I would argue that it is not the concept of “freedom to” that is the issue here, it is the way in which it is defined—according to the song, it is a land where children and rivers run free in the green country.
In short, a utopia.
What if we applied what we learned from this course and instead of a place, recast utopia as a process of becoming? A dream of perpetual motion, if you will. What if we taught youth to think about how “freedom from” mirrors the language of colonialism and instead suggested that the more pertinent issue is that of freedom to? Not just freedom from censorship but freedom to protest, freedom to information and access to it, freedom to be visible, freedom to be anonymous, freedom to wonder, freedom to dream, and freedom to become. We are quickly seeing that virtual spaces are becoming hotbeds for these sorts of fights and the results of those skirmishes have a very real impact on the everyday lives of young adults. If there are teens who view high school as a war zone shouldn’t we arm them with better tactics? What if utopian described not a place but a type of person? Someone who fought accepted notions of the future and did not just wait for it to get better but challenged it, and us, to be better. Just maybe someone like a poet.
I opened with Emily Dickinson and I will return to her to close.
We’d never know how high we are
Until we’re called to rise
And then, if we are true to plan
Our statures touch the skies
Take what you’ve learned from this class and encourage youth to struggle with these notions of “freedom from” and “freedom to.” Help them rise.
In the Darkness, I Find Light
Shoes clicking, she walked through the streets with thoughts in her head and a gun in her hand; she was the queen of New Cap City—in time, would become its god—and didn’t even know it. But that is her future. Right now, she is just a girl who has finally awakened.
Inspired by the analysis of Jacob [and apologies for parroting your ideas–this is my take on your take], I began to think about how the story of Caprica’s “There Is Another Sky” is a familiar one, if you’ve been exposed to any amount of entertainment growing up; it is the story of Alice, of Dorothy, of Neo, and of many others who have left on a quest and come back a hero. Throughout the episode, various characters (e.g., Sam, Tamara, and arguably Zoe) expressed a desire to return home or were admonished to “wake up” and each has, in turn, been ushered along by guides who have demonstrated that the power to change, to belong, to be, or become, has existed in them (and us!) all along. These nascent heroes, like their fictional forbearers, have all ventured into the darkness and found their way back to the world of the living; each of these heroes has woken up and tapped into the power that this revelation brings.
And ultimately, this is the message of the poem by Emily Dickinson, from which this episode draws its title.
There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair.
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there.
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind faded fields—
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers,
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!
The story of the hero is the struggle to preserve light in the darkness; the story of the hero is braving the depths and finding our way home.
The story of the hero becomes our story as we deal with grief and death: when our loved ones die, we travel with them to the land of the dead; for a time being, a part of us dies as well. Caught in a stasis—a kind of unholy limbo—we hear a call to return to the world of the living but also suffer whispers from the underworld. When faced with death, we close ourselves off, afraid to embark upon the path that leads toward resolution because we fear that we will become lost: we fear that we will not be able to make our way back to the land of the living and we fear that we will lose ourselves in the darkness. So we use funerals, like the one shown at the end of the episode, to act as rituals that transcend the everyday, providing a space for us to let go of the dead and to return to the surface; funerals remind us that we belong to a community of the living who will draw us back. This is also what Dickinson’s poem alludes to: there is darkness, but there is also light.
The story of the hero becomes our story as we sit in front of computer screens alone and afraid, living out heroic adventures online but terrified to make the transition into real life. We say that the game allows us to be something; we are so desperate to be something—anything—other than what we are that we forget our worth. We forget that we could be so much more if we only let ourselves be.
We forget that we could be so much more if we only let ourselves be.
As someone who works with teenagers on a regular basis, I am privileged to witness some remarkable feats by young people (more impressive, perhaps, than some of the things that I will ever accomplish) but am also privy to some of the great struggles that individuals go through. In some ways, I think that being a teenager—like Tamara and Zoe—is scary because it is the time when you begin to figure out who you are (and who you want to be) and we don’t always like what we see. So, instead of taking a risk, we simmer in quiet desperation, forever anxious about what might be and forever shameful of our sin. I don’t mean to belittle this—I feel it more deeply than you might ever know—but I choose to embrace the darkness and to call forth the light (you might call it God).
I believe that God exists everywhere and in everything; I believe that we are all interconnected, all part of the life stream (to borrow a phrase from Leoben, who will rock the world of Caprica 50 years hence), and all part of God. I believe that God resides in all parts of our beings, which means that he also exists in those parts of us that we repress and find horrid. In fact, I believe that God’s light shines the brightest in these spaces, for it is where He is needed the most. I believe that God does not love us any less because we have darkness, but also that love is not the same thing as approval. I believe that the solution is not to build more walls, further closing ourselves off from the darkness, but to bring these parts of ourselves to light and to learn to resolve them. We need to realize that one of the greatest gifts God ever gave us was Grace, but that this is a gift that we get to bestow upon ourselves. God never deserts us, but also doesn’t do all of the heavy lifting—we, like our heroes, have to discover that we had the strength all along.
The discovery of God in the blackest places is similar to the voyage that I encourage all of you to take; I challenge my students to confront the darkest parts of themselves and to be secure in the knowledge that they’ll find their way back to the surface. I feel that if students are not able to identify the worst parts of themselves, they’ll never be able to reconcile them and that this leads to a whole host of issues later on. Being comfortable with yourselves—all of you—is, in a way, analogous to finally waking up or finding your way back home.
Come home.
Chris Tokuhama 
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