I know that I started this as a weight loss/health blog, but I think it's just going to become my blog. Just me and my random-ass thoughts that I want to put out there. Maybe you, dear reader, will agree with them. Maybe you won't. I try not to judge. (There are enough people in the world to do that for me, thank you.)
So, I recently had what was probably food poisoning, but it kept me at home for the last three days, making sure I didn't get too far from the bathroom. I seem to be recovering. (I lost 13 pounds this week, but will probably get it back when I stop shitting my brains out...Hey! I need those brains!!)
What brought me here, drear reader, is that in my ick addled phase, I didn't want to think very hard, so I turned on a movie that I used to use to teach genocide and the Holocaust: Hotel Rwanda. I haven't seen it in years, but when I was finished watching it, I was sobbing at the end - and not for all the dead Rwandans, although that was sad as well.
(Side note: Do you ever get that feeling that everything is just kind of better if you've had a good cry. Sometimes I put on REALLY sad movies just to make myself cry. I love those movies, and I do have a good cry, and then I feel a bit emotionally better. Yeah... Catharsis. Love that.... anyway, back to the show).
So, if you haven't seen Hotel Rwanda, here's the plot in a very small nutshell. Rwanda is in political turmoil, some political mucky muck dies, a band of one group of people blame another group of people and decide to kill everybody who they think is responsible because of... some arbitrary bullshit thing that a group of white Europeans put on them. As this band of people goes around trying to kill everybody (thus the genocide bits), one brave dude is like "not in my hotel" and sort of accidentally ends up turning a hotel into a refugee camp, which gets attacked and threatened and nearly loses his family and his life and... lots of people die. In the end, enough of his guests are important (read: rich) enough to call in some favors and get the UN to help them out. Lots of people die, but hotel dude saves like.. a bit over 1000 people or so. (Kinda like African Schindler's list in the 90's).
Now, that's all sad and stuff. People die. They show a lot of dead people. They show bands of people with machetes and machine guns just murdering swaths of people. It's awful. But that's not the part that got me right in the feels the hardest.
There is a scene where Joaquin Phoenix (as this American camera man) is hitting on one of the young women at a bar, and he asks them which group they belong to. They admit to being on opposites sides (but still friends.. yay!) JP comments that "they could be twins", and that's where I kind of got all chilled up weepy... and scared. Mostly because I see so many parallels to our current political situation and that scares me.
Because- Democrats look just like Republicans. Like the Civil War in the 1860's, people take up arms to fight against brothers and sisters, cousins and parents, because of a stupid belief, and I worry so much that someone on the internet may just put out the call to "Cut down the tall trees" like they did in Rwanda to signal the time to kill, and then that will be that and we will have blood on our streets again.
No matter what side you are on of the political debate, you have to admit that the internet and everything is kind of making things crazy, and there are people on completely opposite sides of the political spectrum who look like normal people, but when they open their mouth the crazy just pours out. And that's scary, because on the fringes of "normal people" who are just trying to make a living and get by, are the crazies, and it was the crazies in Rwanda who started taking over and killing people, who took up machetes and machine guns. What's to stop them from doing that here?
I know, there are a lot of fail-safes and systems in place here to stop that from happening. National Guard, military, normal sane people. But it's still scary when you start seeing the little bits of common sense that you thought people have just sort of leaking away.
Do have I have solution? No. Just fear. And hope. And hope is stronger.
We must learn from the past.
