Title: Holier than Thou
Summary: Booker says one thing and thinks another. An introspective on the False Equivalency sequence in the elevator during Chapter 15.
Disclaimer: "Bioshock" and all things related are property of Irrational Games.
Up in a guided cage, he suspects it would be easy for someone her age to develop a strict sense of right and wrong, moral and immoral. Books did only but so much educating, you had to be thrown out into the world to learn not everyone was good and bad, not every battle was based in strictly heroic ideals; and the ones that were are effortlessly demonized because it didn't fit the world view.
Trapped up here in the clouds with the people who declared them subhuman, servant's to their whims, Daisy Fitzroy and her Populi were prisoners of a different kind; what little life Fitzroy had to call her own was ripped from her hands the moment she walked in on Comstock's dead body. The rest of it was twisted to fit the needs of Comstock's agendas against the people who didn't fit his Eden in the sky.
She and her people were fighting to yank the chains from around their necks; hunted down, they were kicked; they were mocked, burned and lynched. Whatever world Elizabeth took them it was the same; only this time, their ardency, their anger was all boiling over on the rancid city.
He remembered taking her up flag in that stigmatized hand; he remembered what he and Slate did for these people to make it all possible; the martyr of her ideals, all in the name of getting what he wanted.
It was easy for someone like Elizabeth, or hell, him, to look upon the Populi's revolution and declare it no better than Comstock's. She never had to live in their shoes, wipe the spit from her chin. Things weren't so simple. The things unfolding before them, it was the kind of rage that festered in a person with no options and lashed out when the opportunity was given. Fitzroy wasn't Comstock's match; she was a creation of Comstock's ideals and belief. The end result of human denied its right to live to the fullest.
You didn't beat a person and expect them kiss you for harming them.
Author's Note: I would recommend readers and anyone else who thinks like Revanninja this to look up phoenix-ace and robothyena on tumblr; they lay down what I'm trying to say in a larger arena of discussion. A minority doesn't have to forgive anything, especially violence foisted upon them by from an overtly aggressive and violent faction; and that not all things are fixed through forgiveness, because the other party would actually have to be remorseful for what they did and its obvious no one in Columbia is remorseful for what they've done to the minorities in that city, not a single soul. Daisy preparing to kill that child, however? That was the writer (Levine) further undermining what was justified violence in the name of defense for minority lives and human rights, just like the false equivalency sequence was. Just to make a strawman comparison. One was justified (Fitzroy), the other was not (Comstock and the people of Columbia), it's that simple. The violence of the oppressor is different dynamic than revolutionary violence by the oppressed confronting Columbia's racism.