To Be, or Not to Be
It was one of those days. As a matter of fact, every day for the past
two weeks had been a repeat performance of one of those days. I’d finally reached the point of no
return. As often happens at peak moments
like this, a scene from a movie came to me.
Star Trek VI to be exact, the
scene where the Enterprise is trying to get to the peace conference to stop the
conspirators from assassinating the President and making sure peace between the
Klingons and Federation of Planets didn’t take place. A prototype Klingon Bird of Prey is keeping
them from getting close enough to beam in.
Ohura has just made the comment that the
ship has to have a tailpipe and a plan has been devised to turn a torpedo into
a gas seeking missile so they can fire back at the Klingons in their way.
Bones and Spock make their way to the
torpedo and as scenes are played from both ships, Chang—played by Christopher
Plummer—quotes Shakespeare.
Chang sat at the seat of command on the Bird
of Prey, saying, “If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not
laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not
revenge?”
Like McCoy, when he said, “I’d give good
money if he’d just shut up,” I too just wished the man standing at the front of
the class would just “shut up”.
I didn’t like using those words, mostly
because I believed that everyone deserved to have their voice heard. But after two weeks of listening to this guy
spout off his theories on why the whole world should be put under Marshall Law
and that one leader be nominated to lead the world.
I understood why the teacher was doing
this. Albert Finney was conducting an
experiment similar to what was done in a high school years ago. They’d recreated what Hitler had done during
his rise to power and at the end of the exercise, the curtain had been lifted
and the students were shown who their new leader was. The students in that school had a better idea
of how Hitler was able to get to the position he did.
As I looked around, I noticed that there
were a few other people in the room looking as fed up with this drivel as I
was. A loud bang from the front of the
room had me turning to see what had happened.
Professor Finney was on the ground, his
shirt covered in blood as the mad man we’d been listening to, held an assault rifle
on us.
The man smiled. “Your assignment is to write everything that
you just saw. Your papers will be due on
Monday when you return to school.” He
looked down at the professor before returning his gaze to us. “By then your teacher will be in better
shape.”
With that, he winked at us and sent us on
our way.
I remained in my seat, hoping to overhear
someone talking about what had happened.
Unfortunately, I was out of luck.
Forcing out the breath I was holding, I stood and slowly walked toward
the door, noticing as I did so that those few other members that were caught
not looking were doing the same thing I was.
I leaned toward one of the others and
asked, “You didn’t happen to see what happened, did you?”
Josh Severs shook his head. “No, but if you guys want to meet at my
house, I can pull up the video so we can watch the section we need.”
Relief poured through all of us as we followed
him to his house across town where he showed us to his room. Sure enough, he had footage of the
class.
One of the girls, Wanda, asked him, “Why
do you tape the class?”
Josh grinned. “I’m not an early bird. I usually fall asleep in this class, but this
way I don’t miss anything.”
We all had our pens and notebooks out as
it got closer to the piece we needed.
All of a sudden, the screen went dark, and the we were eye to eye with
Professor Finney and the Dean of Student, Mildred Vance. Both were smiling.
Professor Finney made some marks on a
clipboard and then returned his gaze to us.
“I look forward to seeing what the seven of you come up with.”
Ms. Vance looked sternly over her glasses
at Josh. “And you, young man, will need
to start paying attention in class. If
you have anymore…surprises set up, I suggest you disconnect them post haste or
instead of graduating, you will be serving out a jail sentence.”
With that, the screen went blank once
again.
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