Using the Force Doesn't Help

(I wrote this a while ago and posted it on my previous blog, but wanted to re-post it here as a sample of the sort of editorializing that I do tend to enjoy partaking in from time to time... I promise there won't be much cross-posting which is this direct.)

The following scene was significantly cut from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi during Luke Skywalker's confrontation with Emperor Palpatine.

Luke: I am a Jedi, like my father before me.

The Emperor:
Ah my boy, you speak the truth more than you know -- but that doesn't make you a Jedi. Examine your motivations -- you told Obi Wan that you couldn't leave home to become a Jedi because of your aunt and uncle. But when you found them dead, killed by stormtroopers, you immediately purposed to not only join the insurrectionist rebellion, but also to become a Jedi that you might avenge your family. This coming what, less than a day after complaining because your now deceased uncle wouldn't let you come join your old friends at the Imperial Academy?
Then when you watched your father strike down your mentor -- a move which your mentor willfully permitted and your father performed, it might be noted, as retribution for losing his legs and being left to burn alive in a midichlorian-forsaken hell-hole -- you re-affirmed your vow of vengeance, but this time you had a singular, personal target: Darth Vader.
Your desire for vengeance would cause you to prematurely abandon your already over-hasty and ill-advised Jedi training in an abject lack of discipline to come gallivanting after your insurrectionist friends out at Bespin where they'd been captured.
When one of your friends was being held by an old mob boss -- who, it must be noted, the Jedi council chose to abjectly ignore throughout their tenure -- as is custom in in that trade, as said mob boss was owed a great sum of money, you embarked on an ill-conceived and poorly-executed plot to free your friend. When the plan began to unravel, you began a homicidal rampage which eventually destroyed his entire sail barge fleet with all hands aboard -- less those that you fed to a Sarlaac. (Suffice to say, the long-term economic damages and subsequent rioting in the town where your father was a child? They're on your hands, boy.)
And how did you get to my throne room? You deserted your insurrectionist friends, even your own newly discovered sister, abandoning them to complete their infinitely important and highly desperate mission with the aid of primitive, puny... teddy bears. Your rationale? You did it so you could spend some quality time with the dad you'd hoped to kill.
My boy, you have not a disciplined bone in your body; not a logical thought in your head. Your grandest visions of harmony are rendered impotent by the passion by which you pursue them. You are a beautiful, hideous poster child of chaos and destruction. And when you say that you are a Jedi like your father before you, you mean that you are a Sith like your father before you -- and I before him.
Now, whether you kill me or you kill him or you simply stand there and let us kill you, the simple fact is that the dark side is in your blood -- it has been from the beginning -- and that, not my nefariously evil rule of the galaxy, not any good that may be left in your father, but rather the darkness within yourself is what accounts for your being here with us today while your friends suffer and die all around in a war that you alternately prolonged and abdicated from. That's you. That's your dark side. And nobody can come to terms with it for you.
Yes, yes... I know it's difficult.
Want a cookie?
No? Well then, so be it... Jedi.