Wind River

I went to see the movie, Wind River, last night. It was in the 'big' theatre at the Amherst Cinema. (I think it holds 250 people. The other theatres are 50 people -- office spaces, really.)

I really like the intimate setting but the one drawback is that the people presence is intensified. Two seats away from me there was a 16 year old who was crunching his popcorn so loudly that I wondered how his mother could hear anything. 

Behind me, there was someone rustling their popcorn bag so much that I wanted to turn around and say, "Can you be quiet?!" While it's nice that the Cinema doesn't use those not-so-ecologically friendly waxed buckets, those buckets are much quieter than a small paper bag. Perhaps I should have availed myself of a glass of wine.

But on to the movie: it's R rated due to violence; there is no sex. At the beginning, you see a young girl running through snow in Wyoming and you suspect there will be no good end to this. And you are right. She is found dead by a hunter who works for Fish and Wildlife. A big part of his job is to hunt predators who are killing farmers' sheep and cattle. 

The movie is incredibly well written -- some of the dialog moved me to tears when a father spoke of his dead daughter. But in the end, it wasn't just the murdered young woman that got to me, it was a general malaise that I see in the real world and in our society.

This is a basic disregard for human life. In this movie, it is focused on Native Americans and women in particular, but I see it as ever-pervasive in our society. And I believe it has been increasing because we have become inured to violence.

Just as I was able to de-sensitize myself by watching real surgery on TV and watching CSI when they show realistic injuries to a body, I think TV and video games (and rhetoric) have made so many more of us insensitive. Kids are growing up thinking you can punch someone repeatedly in the face and they just keep getting up. They think you can hit them with a high powered rifle in the shoulder and they will be fine in a couple of weeks. Or, they just don't care if someone they perceive as a 'bad guy' is killed.

If we were paying attention, one of the things we learned from the Viet Nam war is that the enemy were no longer referred to as people or Vietnamese or Cambodians. They were "gooks" and "geeks" and "the enemy." I'm sure there were more names, but it's harder to kill a person than it is to kill "the enemy." 

My point is, not only do we see violence and violent reactions as okay, but we think it's okay to perpetrate violence on certain classes of people. And those are people we have given names to such as terrorist. It's dangerous. Would you call #45 a terrorist because his words incite violence? What if I decided my neighbor is a terrorist due to her Muslim faith? What if I decided my Latino neighbor must be an undocumented alien and therefore a rapist?

I agree: we have no place for Nazis, terrorists, and murderers. But that does not give us license to kill or maim.

If we are to consider ourselves civilized, we must live by the rule of law. And that says 'do not react with violence when you don't like what people are saying.' That does not preclude a rebuttal or criminal charges if the hate speech incites violence. But we must not sink to the level of those we hate and fall into violence.

While it is not only our duty to stand up to these hate mongers, we have a more urgent duty to not perpetuate violence. We must ensure that that we do allow ourselves to be baited into violence.

As they say, hindsight is 20-20, but I wonder if anti-Nazi street theatre might help. For instance, people lying 'dead' in the streets. Each would have an identifier such as "Jew," "Catholic," "Gypsy," "Disabled."  There are almost too many labels for those the Nazis targeted and killed.

"All we are saying, is give peace a chance." ~ John Lennon