Second Star on the Right
23 Oct 2017LongDistanceClara
This one might sound a bit "soapbox-y" but that's honestly honestly not my intention! I just wanted to put down in writing a few thoughts I had about the Elite universe and without getting too dramatic or over-the-top, how art imitates life! They're just some scribbles and not to be taken too seriously - I'm sure the hardcore canon fans would tear it to shreds - thing is, my senseless ramblings aren't really about canon history. They're more about how people think, so it's not overly reliant on the history/lore of Elite as I'm not really talking about specific politics or governments. Anyhoo this is all a bit of a preamble to my next exploration trip, a jaunt along the Orion Spur 
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Scratch any explorer lightly and beneath the surface you'll find an amateur philosopher.
Granted, most of the philosophies will be overly simplistic and perhaps seem a bit naive! That's just an occupational hazard when you're exposed on a daily basis to the unimaginable scale of the universe. We think of Hutton Orbital as being quite the trek - and yet it's just one solar system among hundreds of billions in our galaxy. In spite of the staggering engineering improvements in frameshift technology and navigational aids, the journey across our galaxy to Oevasy over sixty-five thousand light years from our little corner of civilization on the Orion Spur is still seen as being something of an epic journey.
Yet our galaxy, our mighty Milky Way - is just one of around sixty galaxies that form the Local Group; which in turn is just one cluster of many that forms part of the Virgo Supercluster; which in turn is just one supercluster of hundreds of millions again. Superclusters that come together in unimaginably vast strings billions of light years wide forming cosmic filaments, a network of matter stretching out across our universe.
I'm just saying, sometimes it helps to get a little perspective on things
I'm not so naive as to think that we should all recognize this and live in peace and harmony and daisies overnight of course! We simply can't comprehend the vastness of the universe and so we live our lives in a bubble of our creation because - well, that's the limit of what we can cope with! We're just not built to deal with things on that scale - maybe someday, but we're not there yet. Still, you have to start somewhere, so let's start here...
The Clair is in dock undergoing a comprehensive service after racking up a "few" light years over the last month! Yari, my slf pilot is moving onto bigger and better things and I wish her all the luck in the galaxy! I'll miss her, but we'll stay in touch and along with the Clair being laid up for a while, it gives me the perfect opportunity to go say hi to my parents while I'm back in the bubble
I was born on Capitol in the Achenar system, at the beating heart of the Empire. My origins aren't exactly the stuff legends are made of - very few epics begin with "her father was an accountant and her mother a teacher"! There's honestly not much else to say - I had a happy childhood, times were occasionally hard but nothing that everyone else hasn't had to go through at some point or another. My parents were both hard-working, caring people who brought me up with a fairly open-minded outlook on life (or so I like to think!). One of the lessons my mother taught me stuck with me throughout my life however; and whenever I'm feeling particularly pig-headed and stubborn, I can hear it ringing in the back of my mind...
"Never forget - we go through our lives looking at the world around us out of a window. Over the years we'll shape that window with our thoughts and experiences, but ultimately we only ever see a tiny fraction of everything going on around us because we have such a limited view.
You might look out of your window and see a man chasing a terrified child and decide "what an evil man!"; but your neighbor can see through his window that the child is running towards a cliff, oblivious of the danger and the man is trying to save him. Until you can learn to see the world around you through another's eyes, you'll never see the truth."
My father had a far more succinct way of putting it, with a quote from a favorite author of his from hundreds of years ago:
"Never fall into the trap of cherry-picking facts to suit your theories. There's a saying "My dog has four legs; a cat has four legs; therefore my dog is a cat". Philosophies and ideology based on a limited understanding of only some of the facts aren't worth a damn."
I used to think I knew what my parents meant; I used to think of myself as very open minded, trying to see things from all points of view and feeling all self-righteous and smug about it, as most impetuous kids do! It wasn't until later in life that I realized I hadn't really understood at all. I can't remember when I had this epiphany (probably while doing some tedious cargo running!) when I suddenly realized - I'd been seeing other's points of view, but I'd sub-consciously been trying to make them fit within my frame of reference, my "window".
Until I could honestly drop all my preconceptions, step out of my head and truly try and see through a fresh set of eyes what others could see, I wouldn't get that sense of enlightenment my parents had talked about. So many people (me included!) like to think of themselves as wonderfully liberal and open-minded - without ever really understanding what that means.
And that was one hell of an eye-opener!
Things from other cultures that had seemed so abhorrent now seemed - well, not ok, it's hard to put aside your own life experiences and think in a way totally anathema to you; but at last I could understand how, although it might seem "wrong" by my measure, it wasn't "wrong" in some kind of ludicrous non-existant "absolute" cosmic morality. By the same token, I began to appreciate how things that I had taken for granted all my life as being perfectly acceptable could be so unacceptable to other cultures and civilizations. It led me to a realization that I could never put as clearly as my parents had, but basically it went something like:
People are people, everywhere.
I'm not good with words as a rule so that probably makes no sense at all! The point I'm trying to make is - humans are the same basic machine all over the galaxy. Sure we have different cultures and codes of conduct. Some of us have practices and laws that seem unacceptable to others and vice versa - with both sides equally certain that they are right and the others are wrong, that they are transgressing some kind of "universal" justice. But at heart, we all love and hate, rail against injustice (however WE define it), strive to survive - on that level, we're no different from one another. One side will point to the inequities of another's justice system, citing corruption and privilege, blissfully unaware that the other side sees them in exactly the same light; and here's the kicker - they're both right.
I guess it's impossible not to consider the Federation and the Empire in this light
I know there's something of a detente going on between them right now, although that seems to be born out of necessity; I have no doubt that once the Thargoid issue has been dealt with, both sides will go back to fighting one another. Here's the thing though; feds hate imps, imps hate feds right? Only I know, I know, that if an open-minded fed couple met my parents? They'd get on just fine. They'd embarrass the hell out of us kids and talk about their daily troubles, their hopes and dreams for their children, their life in retirement - people are people everywhere. We try and paint horns on those that don't "fit" within our cultural window-frame but the reality is they're just other living, breathing people "doing them", getting on with life who no doubt paint horns on us.I'm rambling as usual! I always get like this after visiting my folks - and that's something I'll always be grateful for
As far as the Empire goes, I can't speak to the powers that be; the wars that are fought, the lives lost, the inequalities of society and the treatment of the privileged. All I can tell you as I enter orbit and look down on the planet of my birth, I don't see a seething pit of corruption, autocracy and hatred of the Federation and the democratic rights of man - I see the home that I love and the memories of my childhood, both good and bad. I see billions of people living out their lives in happiness and misery, making their way through life just as they do on Earth, or Mars or anywhere else in the bubble. Different cultures, different rules - but people, nonetheless. I know I sound naive but I'd have to disagree - naiveté would be to think that we can get to that state of enlightenment tomorrow, where we recognize and respect our differences. We're basically unchanged as a race for thousands of years now - sometimes it even feels as though we're going backwards! - but I can hope that one day? One day we might make it there.
What was that old expression, "when you wish upon a star"? Well I've got some time. On a whim, I think I'm going to pick a random star and potter off down the Orion Spur in the clipper and poke around the neighborhood while I wait for the Clair to be given a clean bill of health. I don't really have any objective or target in mind this time; I'll just keep picking random systems and wander off into the wilderness.
Second star on the right - and straight on till morning
