I loved The Day the Earth Stood Still!  “Gort, Klaatu barada nikto”…you know what I’m sayin’?  In 1951, when this brilliant, lo-tech classic was released, my classmates and I were still participating in nuclear attack drills by squatting, heads down under our desks.  I think there may have been an additional protocol of drawing the shades to minimize injury from shattered glass.  The nuclear arms race that prompted both the film and these frivolous safety procedures was in full throttle…and we were scared.  On screen, Michael Rennie, Klaatu, was sent to Earth by a far more advanced civilization to give us an ultimatum.  This is my Cliff’s Notes synopsis:

“Stop building weapons of mass destruction or my sidekick, Gort, here, will fry allayall’s asses”.  We, (Earthlings, that is), of course, shoot him.  Wounded, but in the nick of time, he stops Gort from destroying the planet, gives a too-long-for-a-Saturday-matinee-kid’s-attention-span speech about peace and harmony, ending with a warning that Gort will be keeping a robotic eye on us, and streaks off to the stars…roll credits. 

Either, the movie had a disappointing box office, or it was not dubbed into enough languages to get its message out, or nobody grasped the not-so-subtle metaphor, or world leaders didn’t give a rat’s ass, or humans generally suck, Gort or no Gort.  Over the years, a mind-boggling sixty-nine of them, I have stopped hiding under my desk, (I still, occasionally, pull down the shades), and done my best to navigate the sea of sad behavior of my species.  Surely, there is beauty all around us and acts of kindness and compassion, but the brutality sanctioned by feudalism and nationalism, religion, racism and sexism has challenged my inbred idealism at every turn.  I admit to being mostly a prolific complainer, grasping at hope after dashed hope that a Gandhi or MLK or Mandela or Greta Thunberg was going rise up to save us from ourselves.  So far disappointed, I find myself grasping at an oft-used, albeit tongue-in-cheek, plea for an alien intervention to reset our collective moral compass, much like the way extraterrestrials intervened in architecture, (the pyramids…Stonehenge), and science, (uh…science), in our distant past.  I mean, what else could possibly unite the entire population of our planet to abandon its bad behavior and poor choices and cohesively face, full on, an existential threat to us all?