Just don't change Shatner!

Are all changes good things? That was one of the questions asked a lot this past election season, when "change" was the touchstone of both major presidential campaigns -- change was going to come, from one or the other, and that change might be good or bad, depending on who you listened to and what you thought about that person.

Now, it seems, that change will come -- or one of the changes -- and we don't know exactly what to expect from it. Maybe more of the same, maybe more of something else that was previously the same, maybe something completely different that turns out to be something that's completely the same?

Those are the questions asked, too, by the movie Changes are Coming, which posits a bigger change than anyone in the past election could have imagined. In "Changes Are Coming," America changes all the way back to the days of Ancient Rome -- as filtered through the circus of modern America, a change that has such profound implications for humanity (or at least Americanity) that even Jesus' coming back may not be able to help.

Here's the trailer:

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The more things change, I think the implication is, the more they just put new clothes on old problems (or old clothes on new problems?), a dilemma that highlights the idea that "change" itself is neither a good nor a bad thing; asking whether "change" is good or bad is like asking whether a temperature is good or bad. It's all relative. 65 degrees is a great temperature -- if you're talking about whether you want to go for a jog. On the other hand, it's an AWFUL temperature if you're talking about someone's core body temperature.

Change is like that; maybe it's good, maybe it's bad. You've got to, as the movie suggests, look at what is changing, and how.

And you've got to look at the movie. Especially because William Shatner is in it: