Too Stupid to Know . . .
. . . when people are trying to kill you.
I recently watched A History of Violence, a film starring Viggo Mortensen, from LOTR. After an apparently unconnected short violent opening, the film begins to portray the peaceful family life of Tom and Edie Stall, living the american dream in small town Millbrook, Indiana. Tom is a devoted family man, peaceable and loyal to his home and hometown. Nothing seems to foreshadow what is going to happen next.
Late one night, two men walk into Tom's diner just as it is closing. Tom asks them to leave, explaining that the diner was closed. The two men had other plans. One of the men held everyone in the diner at gunpoint, while the other brutalised a female diner employee. Then the older of the two gunmen orders the younger one to kill the woman. What happens next is abrupt, brutal, and decisive.
If Tom had not really believed the younger gunman would kill his employee, he would not have acted as he did. And everyone in the diner would have been killed by the two murdering strangers. If Tom had been too stupid to know that they were planning to kill them all, they would have all died.
Before I saw the film, I read several reviews at rottentomatoes.com. Most of the reviews were simply garbage, of course. I knew that after I had seen the film for myself. You may wish to make the comparison yourself, read the reviews and see the movie.
But I digress. What happens to people who are too stupid to know that other people intend to kill them? They usually die. Often horribly. Primitive people in Rwanda massacred almost a million other people with machetes. Primitive people in Iraq and other places decapitate other people with dull knives, while screaming "allahu akbar!" Primitive people in Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, NYC, Madrid, London, Washington DC, blow themselves up in crowds and buildings to kill as many innocent people as possible.
Do you want to die? There are people who want to kill you, for certain. Are you stupid? Will you passively allow the dull knives to slit your throats, denying to the end that this could really be happening to you?
We are all different, and we all take different messages home from the cinema, and from a news story or a book. There are many things about the world that we see differently from each other, without paying a cost. The one thing we have to see clearly, and understand with certainty, is when someone wants to kill us. None of us can afford the stupidity of denial in such a situation.
I recently watched A History of Violence, a film starring Viggo Mortensen, from LOTR. After an apparently unconnected short violent opening, the film begins to portray the peaceful family life of Tom and Edie Stall, living the american dream in small town Millbrook, Indiana. Tom is a devoted family man, peaceable and loyal to his home and hometown. Nothing seems to foreshadow what is going to happen next.
Late one night, two men walk into Tom's diner just as it is closing. Tom asks them to leave, explaining that the diner was closed. The two men had other plans. One of the men held everyone in the diner at gunpoint, while the other brutalised a female diner employee. Then the older of the two gunmen orders the younger one to kill the woman. What happens next is abrupt, brutal, and decisive.
If Tom had not really believed the younger gunman would kill his employee, he would not have acted as he did. And everyone in the diner would have been killed by the two murdering strangers. If Tom had been too stupid to know that they were planning to kill them all, they would have all died.
Before I saw the film, I read several reviews at rottentomatoes.com. Most of the reviews were simply garbage, of course. I knew that after I had seen the film for myself. You may wish to make the comparison yourself, read the reviews and see the movie.
But I digress. What happens to people who are too stupid to know that other people intend to kill them? They usually die. Often horribly. Primitive people in Rwanda massacred almost a million other people with machetes. Primitive people in Iraq and other places decapitate other people with dull knives, while screaming "allahu akbar!" Primitive people in Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, NYC, Madrid, London, Washington DC, blow themselves up in crowds and buildings to kill as many innocent people as possible.
Do you want to die? There are people who want to kill you, for certain. Are you stupid? Will you passively allow the dull knives to slit your throats, denying to the end that this could really be happening to you?
We are all different, and we all take different messages home from the cinema, and from a news story or a book. There are many things about the world that we see differently from each other, without paying a cost. The one thing we have to see clearly, and understand with certainty, is when someone wants to kill us. None of us can afford the stupidity of denial in such a situation.
Labels: innocence, too stupid
posted by al fin at 10:41 am
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“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” _George Orwell
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