What if...

What if your everyday experiences challenged the assumptions society and tradition demanded? What if others around you were suffering the indignities of inequality over class, gender, and heritage while you lived comfortably, enjoying the privileges those inequalities afforded? What if others were willing to fight and die for their beliefs, while you did no more than question your own? What would it take for you to risk everything and act on the truth in your heart?

Questions, such as these, have weighed on me for some time. Given world events of the last seven years, you probably are not surprised! But actually I have been wondering about “social responsibility and consciousness” for most of my adult life.

Like many issues, my way of exploring such themes is to invent characters and place them in situations where they are challenged to answer questions and live with their consequences. It’s a way of working through circumstance I don’t fully comprehend myself. Through the lives of invented characters I may never arrive at answers or a position, but I can better understand myself—at least, that’s the hope. I am sure I am not alone in this and that many creative people do what they do to work through what they see around them.

The questions I have about what turns a person from denial or neutrality about the social order to activist were actually sparked by events after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The former Soviet states of the early 1990, suddenly confronted by a complete break with their identity of more than fifty years, struggled with new economic and social realities.

Reunification was both glorious and painful for both sides—trying to fit into a world that’s comfortably western and capitalist while also trying to integrate groups of people abandoned by assumptions and a way of life long oppressed upon them. (My friends in West Berlin would write to me about those “uneducated greedy easterners.”) Russia struggled horribly early on with westernization. The Balkans, without the Communist social structure, succumbed to ethnic cleansing and civil war.

In the Times and elsewhere, I read remarkable stories of people coming to terms with not only a skewed troubled past but working to change their present, to look past capitalism’s failings and to carve a place in the new social order they found themselves in—often violently, sometimes peacefully, frequently inspirationally. New states were created and new social institutions manifested.

It was at this time that the characters of Faithful first introduced themselves and began to germanate in my imagination. Since then, they have morphed, but essentially remained on the same quest: what does it take to move from passive participation in the world to active. What does it take to abandon assumptions based on past prejudices and loyalties and embrace new worlds of thought?

Certainly today, as the Western world confronts the growing Islamic worldview, both moderate and radical, these questions hold significant relevance. Perhaps a fantasy story will not yield answers, but then a wise man once said that the journey is more important than the destination. Fantasy and science fiction has a long tradition of holding a mirror to society and reflecting humanity’s Medusa and it’s coat of many colors. I don’t know what conclusions the characters of Faithful will draw for me. I only hope I can make it as honest and interesting a journey as I can.

RICHARDSON