What a Smallville

So last night I was watching an episode of the show Smallville titled Sacrifice from the show's 9th season. In the episode, Checkmate, a secret government agency, has been hacking and downloading information from the Watchtower in order to find its location. Watchtower is the name of the tower that Chloe Sullivan uses to coordinate superhero missions for Clark Kent and the other members of the soon to be Justice League.

Anyways, in the episode, the agent who runs Checkmate, Amanda Waller, says, "if you don't stand with us, you stand against us. It's time for you to pick a side" to the "red blur" who is Clark Kent as Superman.

Clark Kent from the show Smallville.

As soon as I heard this, I immediately thought of play The Crucible that we had read as a class earlier this year. In the play, Judge Danforth tells John Proctor, "that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it."

In both these examples, they give people an ultimatum of either being on their side or being "against" them. Is dissent allows considered loyalty? I think that in many times it can be, although I'm not sure if that's fair to say. Just because someone doesn't agree with a certain policy or idea, does not mean they are necessarily a threat to national security or anything like that. But rather they are a threat to power because they choose to confront what they believe is wrong.