On Assumptions

Several years ago, I entered a restroom.

…

Sorry, I was attempting a dramatically humorous opener this week.

…

But seriously, I remember the experience well:

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On Mutants, and Others Like Me

I recently watched the newest X-Men movie: X-Men: Days of Future Past.

To Set the Scene

We recently moved across the country from Indiana to Oregon. We’re closer to family than we were, but still sixteen hours away. We were in Indiana for seven years. It didn’t feel like home right away, and it continued to feel different and midwesterny, but we’d made many good friends and found many connections and familiarities. It had become home. Now everything is new again. Though we’ve met good people, in many ways, we’re strangers in a strange land.

Not only that, the night that I watched the movie was in the midst of a week in which I was alone at home. My wife had taken our sons to visit family for the week of Thanksgiving, but I was on call for work so I stayed home. I live on campus at a university. There’s usually plenty of noise and activity, but most students had left for Thanksgiving break so it was a bit of a Ghost Town.

This is the context in which I watched the latest X-Men movie.

My Realization: Cerebro is about Tribalism

If you’re familiar at all with the X-Men mythos, then you know of Cerebro. Professor X, the leader and founder of the X-Men, is a telepath and Cerebro is a machine that magnifies his mutant powers.  In Days of Future Past, Cerebro is used to locate one particular mutant. Perhaps because of my current life circumstances, the scene hit me in a particularly interesting way.

As I watched Cerebro being utilized in this movie, and thought back to similar scenes in the past movies, I thought,

“On the surface Cerebro fulfills a political, or social, or strategic function, in these stories, but at it’s core, Cerebro is about tribalism.”

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