SOUTH BRONX SCHOOL: Commander Data, The Borg, and the NYC DOE

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Commander Data, The Borg, and the NYC DOE

Isn't it amazing how art sometimes imitates life?

I swear, I have watched Star Trek: First Contact a thousand times. Never before have I been able to put two and two together and see the striking similarities between the movie and the DOE. Most striking though is the scene in which Commander Data first encounters the Borg Queen.

In the scene Data is in the engineering section when the Borg Queen comes upon him. Like the Blue Angel promises to make Pinocchio a real boy, the Borg Queen promises to make Data a real human.

She turns on his emotion chip, she gives him real skin with feel feeling and sensation. But for Data resistance is not futile. Even though he is an android he resists, he fights back against the Borg Queen, he is a real man, a real human being. He won't back down from the wily intrigues offered by that Borg Queen. Yes, he is tempted for about .00005567 of a second, but in the end, he does the right thing, he is on the side of right, the side of goodness. He will not be assimilated and become some inane Borg drone just wondering mindless through the Collective.

On the opposite side of the story we have the Borg Queen who probably represents most principals in the NYC DOE. The principal that reminds us of the Borg Queen is nothing more than some amalgamation of used mechanical and biological parts barely held together by a thin teetering thread. This type of principal and the Borg Queen share attributes as in wishing to assimilate the weak and mindless, the unknown and faceless. And while the Borg Queen believes that its thoughts are independent as does a principal, both have brains and thoughts that are totally inane, bereft or originality, weak.

Like a Borg Queen it is possible that there is a principal out there, probably many, that are soulless both inside and out. Skanky and waif like, pasty white like the Borg Queen due to not having lack of nourishment of the soul, this type always fizzles out, over reaching thinking that no matter what their way, their method will prevail. It never does.

For in the long run, we, the Commander Datas of the NYC DOE will bend, twist, and turn, but will never break and never give in. We all will misfire on the Enterprise (dear God I hope someone gets this reference!) when it matters.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hopefully it doesn't all end like in "Nemesis" where Data ends up blown to smithereens on the Scimitar....