I was sitting in the front row, close to the projector screen. The film was silent, a print of the original Manhattan Project reel, borrowed from a major library.
I'm sure you've seen this startling little movie, perhaps the most important visual record of the 20th century. It starts with the camera's eye focused on a black horizon. Suddenly, a hideously beautiful light invades the frame, it isn't illumination, which reveals, it's more like an irresistibly violent replacement of the soft darkness of that early desert morning with, something else...something too bright for this world.
The science teacher paused the movie: "this," he quietly said "is what you can do with science." "When you study nature, you learn things. Not all these things are pleasant or even helpful but study and application are key. They give us new abilities: some marvelous, some terrible. What does this have to do with you? There are people who think you're stupid, you're nothing, you're a bunch of ghetto lowlifes.
If you want to deal with them, you need power. There's power in money, sure, but a more fundamental source of power comes from the knowledge that created this" he pointed at the screen behind him, at the frozen image of a forming mushroom cloud.
I leaned closer to the projector screen and felt a new kind of lust. How was this done? How did you get from equations on a blackboard to rehearsing the shattering of worlds in the chilly desert? I wanted this the way a mark wants to believe a stripper really likes him. Perhaps I could never be Niels Bohr, but I knew I didn't want to be fooled, didn't want to live in a world of information and artifacts I didn't understand on any level.
I had enemies. Mostly, it appeared, white adults, who wanted to fill my head with nonsense. Idiots chattering about comparative IQ tests, so-called teachers trying to tract me into less challenging material, fuck ups claiming to be in the same league as Pericles or Shakespeare or Einstein because their skin happened to be lighter than mine and they had a few more dollars in their pocket.
I wanted to go the total Stalin on their asses, wipe these jackasses from the face of the earth, gather them together and toss them into Trinity's brief, but devastating, solar furnace, see their cities reduced to ashes, crush their heat brittlized skulls between my hands. Of course, none of that was an option, I was born in the wrong age to properly serve Mars. The next best thing was, simply, to know more and, with that knowledge, do more.
This was/is also a form of warfare.
.d.