Of Empires

We are about a week away from the latest installment of the Star Wars saga.  Over the past several years this occurrence has helped me remember the excitement of Christmas, in a purely non-spiritual sense.  I mean the waiting for something that I really wanted part, not the birth of Jesus part.  Sometimes I am jazzed about what comes about in a galaxy far far away, other times... well let's just say by the time Obi Wan left Anakin smoldering by the lava river of Mustafar I was pretty much in favor of that whiny little ingrate turning into the Darth Vader that was both cool and terrifying to 10 year old me.  If you don't know what any of that means, bear with me a second, because this isn't primarily about Star Wars, and I'm going to get on with it.
The thing that I think makes Star Wars stories compelling is not the Force, or Lightsabers, definitely not the Jedi, it probably isn't even Han Solo and Chewbacca, it is the presence of the Empire, or in the latest installations the First Order.  The narrative of the Galactic Empire gives real zing to the stories, because it connects them to real stuff in a way that Ewoks definitely do not.  Say what you want about the prequels, but seeing a fictional account of people choosing security over freedom and making deals with Dark Lords to secure power, rings pretty real in 21st century America.
Because let's face it, at the moment we're the only thing that honestly passes for an Empire on our planet, which given the absence of hyper-drives is pretty much what we're stuck with for now. People other than myself have undertaken the thought experiment (a fun thing to do with fictional narratives) of putting the Star Wars shoe on the other foot.  What if Luke Skywalker is a terrorist?  Because blowing up a space station (two actually) with thousands of people on board, only two of which appear patently evil is a pretty terrorist thing to do.  Did you ever wonder who those Stormtroopers were under the helmets?  Did they have families?  Were they clones? Or, even if they were clones, is it really ethical to create sentient beings for the sole purpose of war?  What about all the non-combat personnel that must have inhabited those enormous mechanical planets?
You get the idea, as Obi Wan Kenobi said, "many of the truths we cling to depend largely on our point of view."  I have been thinking a lot lately about how the rest of the people on our planet are looking at the good old U.S.A. lately.  And, no, it's not just because of Trump, I actually think I first started this during the Clinton administration, and did it quite a bit during the G.W. Bush years as we kept tearing off into new wars every six months or so.  Even during the Obama years, where I was proud of having a grown up president, and finally breaking the white guy monopoly on the chief executive, I had questions about our use of drones and the ethics of being able to kill so terribly efficiently with no skin in the game, it seemed awfully like the kind of thing the sinister Trade Federation did with its droid army.
It's a peculiar place for our country to be honestly.  After all we have this foundation story of a rag-tag group of colonists who rebelled against the great and glorious British Empire.  Who would have known that two hundred years later we would be acting as a defacto colonial power with our military apparatus in every corner of the globe and our economic and cultural influence dominant even where we don't have guns and bombs.  We also have the threat of a planet killing arsenal of nuclear weapons at our disposal. It seems sort of false to pretend like we are the underdog in any fight at the moment, but that doesn't stop us from trying.  We may have a serious challenger in China, but I sort of doubt that they would ever try and assume the role of world policeman, even if they do dethrone our economic hegemony.
Empires never manage to be entirely benevolent to those they rule.  In non-fictional worlds though, they are rarely as monolithic and sinister as we try and make them.  Nuances in the behavior of Empires though rarely matter to those on the receiving end of their inevitable brutality.  I don't reckon that the people Rome habitually crucified really had much appreciation for their roads and aqueducts or their experiment with democracy.  Likewise, I doubt an Afghani who had to bury a couple children in pieces thanks to our bombs, will really much appreciate our high ideals of liberty and justice for all.
The scariest parts of Star Wars, are those places where the Sith start to make sense, because then I realize how seductive the Dark Side can really be.  It scares me when I buy the justifications of our Empire hook line and sinker, without trying to comprehend the human cost of our power and might. I don't want to do that, because I am trying to follow a man who rejected the lure of empire and power to an extreme degree.  I want to follow the example of grace and peace rather than violence and power.  So I ask myself, since I'm pretty surely part of the Empire, what does it mean to work for the rebellion from within?  What sort of stand breaks the cycles of violence?  What force needs to be used to resist the dominion that we have a hard time even acknowledging we have?