Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! The Public Service

Is it just me or is anyone else creeped out by the people's causal acceptance of the dystopian Ministry here?

I mean let's count the offenses here...

* Spying on people 24/7 (this USED to spark outrage)

* Arresting people without charge.

* TORTURING a planet of Precognitives by preventing them from even being able to sleep.

* Admitted conscription (Do none of you have a problem with a DRAFT?) of youngsters to fight wars.

* Backhanded support of mass murdering youths Tianimin Square style on Lallor.

* Attempting to bulldoze down private property without permission (The Legion HQ)

I'm sure there's plenty I'm missing. This thing is a nightmare. How do people actually support this and not be ashamed of themselves?

Get out the pitchfork, guns, and torches. I'd be all for VIOLENT revolution.

Gee Charles, you make it sound like something bad. Another two years at the Re-education Farm for you!

We don't know how much people actually support the Public Service and how much they are intimidated into accepting it. Perhaps there is a lot of repression of adults that isn't shown? (I rather doubt this explanation, since even the "radical" Morgnas don't appear to be particularly subversive. We haven't had any hint that there are adult political prisoners or insurgents.)

I'd have to figure that something really horrible happened within the current adults' memory to make them readily accept this security state - security at all costs and civil rights be damned. A heavy-duty propoganda effort would have convinced most adults that all this is for the best, for themselves and their children.

One thing that strikes me is the motivation of the young people: are they resisting the Public Service as kids resist their parents telling them to be home by midnight? In other words, just fighting any parental control - rather than realizing the full extent of the subjugation? Some of the underagers appear to be rebelling against bad economic conditions, a few are aware of the draft/war threat - but a lot of them just seem to want to be free to party. I wonder if he "party" guys would cave in at the first sign of violent revolution. Maybe most of them don't even have a concept of civil rights at this point.

Given the way the story is moving, any violence at this point will probably be undertaken to fight the invaders - not the Science Police or whatever other body put the Public Service into effect.

There are adverts for gene-tagging in the TT'LSH X-over too, which makes me wonder if the public service is relatively new so the majority haven't twigged how potentially dangerous it can be.

According to Waid, the children on the Public Service can also be "programmed to find junk food and other 'bad things' physically nauseating". The other "bad things" probably include drugs and stuff. And if the kids can be "eavesdropped on with ease", you can imagine how the loss of privacy must affect sexual experimentation (is that why Bilis took Thola to a deserted planetoid?). Today we give our kids cell phones not only to ensure their safety but as a means of keeping track of them at all times. Tomorrow we wire them to the Public Service for similar reasons. It's not at all implausible and, sad to say, even the more liberal 31st century parents probably consider it a necessary evil.

I have heard that there are services being proposed now to implant RFID tags into your kids. Much like a rancher would do to his cattle just to make sure they can easily be found if they wander off.

L.A. County Jail to Track Inmates
US Passports To Recieve RFID Chips
RFID Tags to Track Your Food
RFID Tags To Track Foreigners , Identify Dead
Student RFID Tracking Suspended from School

The Public Service is already here. And it won't be limited to the children. Get used to it.

The resistance to it as something good is something I think it's important to note.

One thing that Waid is forwarding that I think is rubbing a lot of readers the wrong way is that a lot of Legionaires are not there out of blanket loathing for the Public Service but there for their own reasons (like many youth counterculture movements). The problem is that a lot of people have difficulty with a 'young' group of people recognizing a movement against it basically. The fact Legion fans are certainly in their twenties and older also makes them be defensive against the percieve age bias when it's really against a very specific branch of the government.

Also, the government that supports the Public Service isn't necessarily an evil one either. It just has repressive membership. When faced with hordes of the usual comic book villains, we expect them to be ridiculously evil. I'm inclined to think of it as an evil department of a bumbling government...sort of like the Ministry of Magic in Harr Potter.

In this case, the Legion seems to just want reform rather than overthrowing the government.

I think reading the current Legion as a kind of metaphor for contemporary society is quite interesting. I mean, the world in which people spend more time chatting with one another electronically than actually talking in person, even in which people learn all about one another from profiles in online communities before they ever actually "meet" one another... that's pretty much the kind of the world my friends and I find ourselves living in increasingly.

This connects quite a bit to the appeal to the Silver Age of comics, which harkens back to a time when comic books were really a pop culture phenomenon, and were read by the young people who went on to found a mass counter-culture movement, as opposed to today's comics, which are mostly a very limited subculture of "comic geeks".

In a sense, the whole series can be read as a call to reclaim the sort of idealism characteristic of the sixties as opposed to the values of today's socity.

Variations on the Public Service, here and now:

For teenagers, it is a sound as irritating as their mother's nagging: a high-pitched shriek that refuses to go away. For adults, the sound is . . . silence. It is called the Mosquito and it is designed to deter young people from loitering outside shops. It emits a piercing, high frequency sound that is audible only, in 90 per cent of cases, to people under the age of 20. While teenagers are forced to run for cover, most adults remain oblivious. Nearly 100 stores and some local councils have placed orders for the device, which went into production on Wednesday. A retail chain also plans to introduce it in its corner shops.

The Telegraph India