May 2007

I love watching movies.

It’s one of my favourite past times and time wasters. Usually its just enjoyable escapism (which may or may not be a bad thing i suppose) but periodically i watch a movie which leaves me overwhelmed in many ways. Speechless in a sense but in an opposite sense overloaded with emotion and thought.

Movies like Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond, The Constant Gardener, and one which i just watched Lord of War. Maybe its the driving fact that these movies are based in reality. Granted - not MY reality. My reality is far from that.But that is some people’s reality - it could just as easily been mine or yours had we been born anywhere else.

In these movies you see people being killed as though they are nothing - children being trained as warriors, carrying AK- 47s and given cocaine so they can kill without even realizing what they are doin.

That is their reality.

They are born into sitations where they see people dying everyday. Death is part of life. I’ve hardly encountered death in my life - maybe two or three people that were really a part of my life in any way have died…In Lord of War it shows the reality of how firearms are smuggled around the world
to give ppl the ability to kill each other.

A quote from the movie says, “It is said Evil prevails when good men do nothing -
the truth is, Evil Prevails”

After seeing these movies, sometimes i can’t help but think thats true. I feel helpless to help. What can one person do to change a world full of corrupt individuals, corrupt governments, of people born into a situation where its kill or be killed? But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe everyone who thinks of these things thinks, “But what can i do?” and so..no one does anything. Maybe all the good people use the concept that ‘evil prevails’ as a way to justify a blind eye. To shut it out and turn it off because it’s scary and uncomfortable. To file it away in back of our minds behind what time the new Lost episode comes on.

All that said — I still don’t what i could ever do. I literally sat there and cried after watching that movie — not because of a sappy storyline or due to really moving acting (honest, Nicolas Cage doesn’t stir me to tears) — but because this is real.

There was a scene in the movie with a warehouse full of machine guns. On the DVD the behind the scenes section lets us know that it was cheaper for them to purchase a few thousand real guns for that scene than fake ones.Another impressive scene in the film showed a line of a few hundred armored tanks. They were allowed to use them in the movie for the shot and a month afterwards they were sold illegally to forces in one of the many war zones in Africa.

Here in Barbados, in front my computer, or my TV…driving around where my biggest complaint is either
pot holes or KFC has run out of chicken again, I forget — we forget that thousands of people…

people

…just like me, just like you are dying. Some from hunger, or from Aids or being shot in refugee camps or dragged out of their homes while they sleep. Children are being raised up to kill without remorse. Human being’s lives are the price paid for our diamonds and oil. Its easy for me to comfort myself and say, ‘It’s a movie — it’s dramatization, the situation isn’t that bad really.” But wouldn’t that just be a way to pretend that these people’s reality does not exist?

To them — maybe they can’t believe that my reality exists. That people live and exist on this side of the world, and know, and make movies about their deaths, and sit and really at the end of the day most of us do nothing. Perhaps this is because we can’t or maybe we just don’t know how. Part of me knows though, that their reality deserves more than just a couple hours of my ‘entertainment’.

So i ask, what can I do? And really honestly, i still don’t know.

And all I can think to do is to come here and write down my thoughts and pray — because I know that the God that exists in my reality — exists in theirs, even if they may not know it.

That one thread ties us together. That one thread seeks to redeem both of our realities.