Remember, Remember the Fifth of November,

"Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot..."

Guy Fawkes, the genuine man, was in all reality something of a fool and quite a long stretch from being any sort of inspiration – for those of you who do not know, the idea of blowing up Parliament wasn't originally his own, but rather that of his co-conspirators. No, he just happened to be the lucky fellow who was given the duty of lighting the fuses and making a few last preparations, and of course being the one who was caught and made a public example of. Then of course you have the fact that he wasn't really trying to overthrow the totalitarian government of the day, but was rather attempting to assassinate the majority of the Protestants who had taken control of the government and return Catholicism to a seat of unquestioned power in the country. Rather than attempting to overthrow a rather broken and unjust body of government and replace it with a more sensible one, he was merely trying to replace it with an equally unjust one…merely one that would be more favorable towards him and his chosen beliefs.

The fact is that Guy Fawkes Night, November the Fifth, throughout history has been about celebrating his failure rather than anything related to what he tried to do, and the celebrations have mostly centered around burning effigies of him on bonfires. For most of his history the Guy has been cast as a symbol of villainy, one whose defeat was a cause for both ridicule and celebration.

And yet for many of us, both before and after the brilliant work of Alan Moore, the fifth of November has come to symbolize something far greater than the man who originally inspired it and the machinations that made him infamous. For many of us, it has become a day not to remember that a man once decided he did not like a situation and thusly attempted to change it by blowing something all to hell (for such men are a dime a dozen throughout history, and many of them have been far more successful in their plans), but rather an occasion to remember one very simple, very dangerous idea. And that is the revolutionary idea that people do not need a vast army, immense wealth, or deep reserves of power in order to change our world. It is the humble idea that this can instead be accomplished by the lowly individual, the fiscally poor, and those of us who are most oft deemed as the "powerless."

From our earliest days we are bred, trained, and tested on the idea that many of the great changes we wish to see in our world can simply never be brought about, and that so many of the horrors and atrocities that are allowed to pass day by day can never be averted.  We are told that we must meekly learn to accept these “immutable facts of life,” and in that same breath they will scoff at the notion of a few mere individuals affecting any of these supposed “truths” in the slightest sense. They will warn you that such possibilities reside entirely in the worlds of fiction and fantasy, and that it would be best if you cast such childish thoughts from your mind. And yet, in the failures of a man who jumped from a gallows and broke his neck long before any of us were born so too do we see the failures of this very ideal. Even though their “Gunpowder Plot” failed in the end, a few common men came very close to blowing up a building, and in doing so quite nearly changed the course of history as we know it. And they did this without an army. They did it without wealth or power or influence. Thirteen men nearly changed much of what we know today, and they would have done it with nothing but determination and some barrels of gun powder. The truth is that they nearly did something that we have been told time and time again is "impossible." 

And as I pointed out earlier there are still others throughout history with similar ideas and plans, some of whom actually succeeded in their goals, and when combined with Fawkes' failure these brilliant or monstrous people serve to remind us of that one humbling, dangerous fact- any person can bring about a change in this world, any one of us can spit in the face of these “facts” and “truths” that we are commanded to carry as an ever growing burden on our weary backs. The dangerous truth that Fawkes taught us is that all it takes to change the world is for one individual to discover within themselves a willingness to go to the lengths needed to accomplish it, whatever they may be, and an equal willingness to make the required sacrifices as they are called for. They tell us that a single person could never change our world, and at the end of the day maybe there is some truth to that. But what they forget themselves, or perhaps merely wish for us to forget, is that when a person discovers these things within themselves, when that individual embraces them and allows them to become a force driving them ever forward with all the unrelenting force of a tsunami, they chance becoming something more than merely a person…and in that strange territory, on those unknown roads, anything is possible. Beyond the borders of the every day, in the land where gunpowder and words might perhaps make us more than what we are, we find the slim chance that a man in a mask might indeed change the world.

Bruce Lee once said that, "Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it'll spread over into the rest of your life. It'll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but do not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level." These ideas are to me a far closer approximation of what the fifth of November has come to mean for not just myself, but for many of us- it has become a day not to remember the failings of a man, but instead, a day to remember the possibilities of an idea. And that is something to never, ever forget.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November.