Backlog: The Crucible

Just watched The Cruicible with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, which btw, is labeled as "Courtroom Dramas" on Netflix...

So, I am slowly coming to the realization that I have been a bad student in my younger youth. I never quite grasped or remembered the core conflict of The Crucible, which is that Rev. Parris peruses the witch hunt because of the potentially he could get all those witches and devil-worshiper's land.

I turned this video on as background noise to drown out the construction outside fixing the water way that supplies San Francisco with fresh water. I began to pay attention to it when I heard this uttered by the Judge Hathorne, who, at least in the movie version, seem to be conscious of the underlying struggle for land, and may well be paid under the table by the Rev. Parris for his bias. The sentence uttered is:

"""
[A] person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between
"""

And I always thought George W. Bush coined "You're either with me or against me" In his fight against modern terrorism... But it appears, after a briefing Binging session (as opposed to Googling, for some reason my Chrome defaults to Binging for results), that "You are either with us or against us" is quite well used and studied and has been spoken by the Romans and Jesus Christ. It is known as a false dilemma if the decision is not a two-way decision.

... Any ways, the main lesson of two hours spent hunched over laptop watching netflix is that irrationality and blatantly illogical reasoning arise out of ulterior motives. The McCarthy Era, the subject of The Crucible, apparently, according to Yahoo Answers, is a similar struggle by the Republicans for power.

It leaves me wondering, did this McCarthy Era actually strengthen America? Did the consolidation of the land in Salem Mass. have positive effect on the local political and economic system? Did it have a good side effect on American Christian communities? And why is it, that I, who am not a Christian, feel so moved by the recitation of the Lord's Prayer at the last hanging of John Proctor and the people against whom he could not lie, in this movie is based on a play written by a person of Polish-Jewish upbringing (according to wikipedia), but an atheist by his own account. I wonder... what really happened when these says were originally said, were they all on the edge of death from persecution, filled with regrets of a live shortened, yet hopeful in the correctness of choices made?

Have we humans really lived this way for these thousands of years, and continue in the same ways?