Minbari Mondays, The Coming of Shadows, Choices, and Conscience

      Good news!  The Great Machine, on Epsilon III, is now delivering messages again, through time and space!  This week’s set of incidents is the 9th this year, the third year of operation of the 5th Babylon station.  These events, in particular, have much to do with her Order, so it is with great pleasure that I renew our correspondence from Ranger Mayann, writing to us from a long time from now, in one of the principal cities of her planet, Minbar:

 

—

Greetings, from Tuzanor:

 

The events of this day, in your Earth year 2259, are critical history to The Anla’Shok, as I look back from what is now your earth year 2278.  While my Order suspected your existence for many years, only at this time were we fully able to begin working together with you, the other half of our soul-race.  I am writing to you from over 200 years in your future, in the hope of helping to prepare you Humans for the great darkness to come, if it cannot be avoided.

 

The keys to either avoiding, or surviving, the coming darkness are the same: acts of conscience, borne of choices made for the right reasons.

 

Some, like Mr. Garibaldi, lock up the voice of conscience until the demands of that voice break through.  My colleague, a Human member of my Order, persisted.  He continued demanding to speak, until Garibaldi listened.  A gatekeeper who listens to his conscience is a worthy one.

 

Many though, like Londo Mollari, do not listen to the voice of conscience.  For Mollari, that voice was the humble Vir Cotto.  His pleas fell on deaf ears, but not without warning.  Conscience begs us to do what is right, but the choice remains in our hands.

 

The Centauri emperor Turhan was moved by the choices of Captain Sheridan, Commander Ivanova, and Dr. Franklin to put themselves “in harm’s way in the interest of peace.”

 

The choice of Ambassador G’Kar was far less pacific, but failed to accomplish his goal, fortunately for him and his people.  Had he succeeded, the bloodshed which began that day might never have ended, until all of Narn and its people were entirely wiped out.  So, the choice of his greatest enemy, at this point in history, turned out to be slightly less destructive than that of G’Kar, even if both of their choices were made for the wrong reasons.

 

Remember:

                            Conscience Matters.

                     Choices Matter.

               Reasons Matter.   

 

Writing from Tuzanor, on Minbar

Earth year2278,

 

Anla’Shok Mayann

–

 

             Sorry for the lag in Ranger Mayann’s perspective reviews, these past few weeks.  I’ve been too tired to make the extra effort, after extracting the themes, to get into her character for her ‘letter’ from the Minbari perspective on the last couple of episodes, but now that my first draft of Do Better is done and needs to rest a bit, I am going back to some of my story work, including the next B5 reviews from the pov of this new character.

         Many thanks to Neatnik for pointing out that this episode won the first of two Hugo awards for Babylon 5.  His review gives a more traditional plot and character perspective of episode 9, season 2.

 

Last week’s review was of the s2, original order ep 8: Soul Mates…

next week will post on Monday…

 

-Shira Destinie Jones

Shira

 

Nih sakh sh’lekk, sleem wa.

I come in peace, I am your friend.

 

There are earlier episodes, as part of a letter on the history of the Babylon Project.  

Action Items:

1.)  Share your thoughts on the importance of having and following a conscience, and of the reasons behind the choices we make, please.

2.) Share your thoughts on how we Human Beings might start to build a more fully inclusive society for all of us, and how this episode of Babylon 5 could help that process.

3.) Write a story, post or tweet that uses these thoughts.

Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness,  #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking for COVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport

Read, Write

-we can learn from the past Stayed on Freedom’s Call for free,

     by Teaching and Learning (Lesson Plans offline) in the present, to

           help build a kinder future: Baby Acres: a Vision of a Better World

(Online pdfs of 5 month GED lesson 5 of 67 plans),

   and  Babylon 5 review posts, from a Minbari Ranger’s perspective: story inspires learning…

Nih sakh sh’lekk, sleem wa.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

the year, 2021 CE = year 12021 HE

Stayed on Freedom’s Call
(free: https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…)
includes two ‘imagination-rich’ walking tours, with songs, of Washington, DC. New interviews and research are woven into stories of old struggles shared by both the Jewish and African-American communities in the capital city.

Shared histories are explored from a new perspective of cultural parallels and parallel institution-building which brought the two communities together culturally and historically.

Please leave a review, if you can, on the GoodReads page.

Shira Destinie Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.