Daleks

Last year, my family took a trip to England. While we were there, we were delighted to discover a museum-like-thing called the Doctor Who Experience. My dad, who has been a Doctor Who fan since college, had gleefully introduced my brother and myself to the show just the night before, and so of course we were all thrilled by the prospect. (My mom just tagged along with her nerdy family, which she seems to be very accustomed to doing because it happens so often.) Half of the "Doctor Who Experience" was a little museum displaying a wide variety of props, costumes, and even sets from the actual show (I GOT TO SEE THE ACTUAL INSIDE OF THE TENTH DOCTOR'S TARDIS, AND HIS ACTUAL SONIC SCREWDRIVER!!!) and other such things that (as demonstrated in the last set of parentheses) would make a diehard fan scream with delight, but the half salient to what I want to write about tonight was an actual Doctor Who experience, in which the Doctor whisks you away in the TARDIS and you wind up more or less living through an episode of the show. In one instance that starts out nervewracking but turns pretty funny by the end, you get kidnapped by the Daleks.

--Explanatory Note for Non-Whovians--
Daleks are possibly the most famous Doctor Who villain of all time. Certainly they are the most consistently recurring. They are a robotic race that started out as organic creatures, but were so destroyed by a series of disasters (wars, plagues, etc.) that they wound up building themselves protective shells--which look remarkably like inverted trash cans with attached toilet plungers and paint rollers and a few other modifications that are more difficult to identify, because Daleks were created back when the show had a ridiculously low budget to work around--and taking to outer space to wage more wars. They are known to bloviate in mechanical voices in ways that make it clear that they are highly xenophobic, which is not a trait well-suited to space travel in a universe filled with aliens, and thus the Doctor is their worst enemy. They would be terrifying if they weren't so darn funny.

 Being kidnapped by the Daleks, whose plungers can shoot laser beams, is generally a pretty scary thing. I was rather unnerved by it, until the Daleks that had kidnapped the museum attendees got into an argument with another group of Daleks, which mostly consisted of the two groups shouting back and forth at each other, "YOU ARE IN-FER-I-OR!!" At that point, my brother turned to me and whispered that the etiquette teacher I'd had in sixth grade for all of one lesson must have been a Dalek.

Daleks are funny, because a) they're fictional and b) it's hard to take accusations of inferiority seriously when they're coming from an inverted trash can sporting a toilet plunger and a paint roller that c) has been demonstrably defeated at various times with nothing but a wooden floor, or a pastry, or nostalgia. But while Daleks don't exist in real life, Dalek attitudes do.

Dalek ideas expressed in real life--as they were, in exactly the same words, by my aforementioned etiquette teacher--are terrifying. I can't find the words to explain why, but somehow I don't think I need to explain completely. I think it would be enough to say that my best friend and I signed up for an etiquette class thinking that it would be a fun thing to do together, learning about the nuances of old-fashioned courtesy just in case we ever wanted to know that, and were blindsided when we arrived and the first activity on the agenda was to interrogate every person about what ways that student's manners were so terrible as to warrant being forced to take an etiquette class. I was shocked into forgetting why I'd come. Later in the class, as the teacher rambled on about how this class would cause us to have better manners, but we shouldn't make anyone else feel inferior for being less refined, my friend raised her hand and said politely, "But, ma'am, you're making us feel inferior."

It was more than a fair point. It was a way of pointing out, probably mostly from instinct given that we were only twelve and hadn't really had much reason to study the subject before, that elegant manners exist for the sole purpose of acknowledging that other people deserve respect.

But that teacher looked her right in the eye and said, "You are inferior."

That was one of the most shocking things I have ever heard said--because I think that was the heart of every shocking thing that anyone has ever said. "You are inferior" so easily becomes the famous Dalek attitude: "YOU ARE IN-FER-I-OR. YOU MUST BE EX-TER-MI-NA-TED." It's funny when it's a trash can threatening you with a plunger--but it isn't at all funny in real life.

"You are inferior" becomes "it's okay for me to be mean to you," and I spiral into depression at the age of fifteen. Because people told me, for my whole life, that I was inferior--and after such a long time with no letup, I started to believe it.

"You are inferior" becomes "it's okay for me to deny you the medication your mental and physical health depends on if you taking it inconveniences me," and I spend three months of my fourth grade year showing obvious signs of mental and physical illness--and the teacher punishes me for showing those symptoms by further restricting the treatment that would solve them.

"You are inferior" becomes "it's okay for me to declare to the world at large that I hate you and everyone like you, even if I don't have any idea who you are," and thus I and many others have to shoulder the burden of trying to ignore the hate, even though it's still shocking and jarring and painful, especially when it comes up in the middle of a conversation with about something else entirely--they just have so much hate that they have to mention it whenever they can find an excuse.

It hurts every single time, and it shows up so many places--especially that last variation, which hits me right in the face all the time. Because all these things are specifically hurtful, both in themselves and because they are ways of saying "you are inferior."

To everyone who has ever been told that--and I suspect that may well mean everyone ever, period--it's not true. Not even when it's coming from people you respect, people you love. You are NOT inferior.

I was thinking that I'd write this post about this problem with respect to theological criticism, since that was what prompted me to write it in the first place, but I suppose I'll write that one later.