The cause of Thanos
majority of our country’s citizens. I personally do not subscribe to this approach, and even protest it.
But who am I to wash my hands clean as I also, as a conservationist, sometimes talk about how in our relatively little time on the planet, we humans have caused climate change, pushed other species to extinction, and suffocated our planet with waste – and thus think about how much chance we got in the midst of the problems we face today, if there were just half as many people on Earth?
It scared me. Yes, it was just a movie, and we succumbed to this commercial franchise flirting with moral discourse. I will not pretend to have the ability or higher understanding to interpret what Thanos stood for, so I need support from the community who reads this column to make sense of our post-Infinity War thoughts and feelings, and allow us to treat each other and the planet better. It felt like I needed a post-traumatic stress disorder therapy, with respect to real PTSD patients everywhere.
After the film, I had to sit down with Charley, our Advocacy Officer, and talked about what our feelings about Thanos meant. She told me how interesting it is (spoiler alert, sorry) that Thanos did end up watching the sunset in the Philippines. He looked at peace, and the surrounding Banaue-looking scenery is peaceful.
But we were in turmoil, those who have been affected by the movie and similar artistic expressions of life and death. In myself, it was due to the moral dilemma of a drastic population control for the sake of ecological balance. Because of this turmoil, we know it wasn’t peace that Thanos brought.
We know in our hearts that peace does not mean killing and that it is not for any human, no matter how genius or noble, to have an exclusive claim to righteousness. We have pitfalls and flaws, so we cannot, and should not, play God.
And we know in our hearts that there are other ways because Thanos’ plan sucks – that even if he wiped out half of the population of the universe, we would still re-populate exponentially and mess up our resources to extinction after a couple hundred years. And, I’m pretty sure the Avengers will “avenge” themselves in the next movie (nice plan, Marvel!) while there are a million other, nonviolent plans for the world to be peaceful and sustainable for us to participate in.