It Aint Fair...

I should 100% be going to sleep right now, but instead I'm writing this post.  Once again I am faced with a topic far too vast to be addressed in a small, insignificant blog, but again I feel impelled to put my thoughts into words for my own sake if for nothing else.

I would not have thought that my young adult fiction class would be the class to provoke most of my "deep thinking" for the semester.  "Deep thinking" is the name I gave just this instant to what I consider to be the very best part of my academic career--the thinking I do beyond, above, around, and through my assignments.  It's when I take ideas and carry them through and really explore them.  Usually it has nothing to do with actual class work or credit.  And I repeat, I did not expect my YA fiction class to be the one to spark it.

But I have been lucky.  My professor has assigned us, thus far at least, some truly superb books.  This week's was Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.  I read it today.  I think I read it once before years and years ago, but apparently it was one of a very small list of books that I don't remember very well at all.  So today was an essentially fresh and new reading.

Somehow, inhumanity and cruel treatment of others has become a theme in my life the last couple of weeks.  Last week I read the Hitler Youth book, about which I posted.  Then the Holocaust and WWII seemed to keep coming up in various disparate points in my life.  Then there is this book, which fits right in to the theme.  And now, after two weeks of stories about people hating, hurting, and dehumanizing other people, I am starting to chafe and feel raw.

The fact is, when I read these stories about Nazis beating and murdering Jews without remorse, or white men slapping and kicking black children who happened to look at them wrong, the fact is that I am flooded with righteous wrath.  I want to take the fear those poor people experienced and I want to take it right into the hearts of their tormentors.  I want them to know exactly what they put their poor victims through.  I want to cause them the same pain they cause to others because I feel like that is the only way they could ever understand what they'd done.  And it is the only way to make things right and even and square...

Even as I'm writing this I'm brimming with emotion--utter fury that a human being could treat another in such a way, wringing sympathy for those who suffered such vindictive treatment, and embarrassment that I should presume to pity these people as though I can even begin to comprehend their experiences.  I mean, I can read this book, or To Kill A Mockingbird or Hitler's Youth, or any other book, but I can never really fathom what it was like to live in the same world as the actual people.  So who am I to be angry on their behalf or sorry for them?  Who am I to read their stories and then write a blog post as though I have something important to say?

But I must.  Because as I was sitting here on my bed, wondering how things like Slavery and the Holocaust could exist, I suddenly had a bright shining realization that had the gleam of truth about it.

To understand I will take you on somewhat of a tangent.  I'm sure you all remember the movie Taken.  The Liam Neeson movie that came out a year or two ago that everyone just loved.  In it an ex-CIA operative has retired to be closer to his daughter.  She goes on a holiday to Europe and is kidnapped by sex-traders.  Her father then goes on a bloody rampage through Europe to rescue her, killing brutally, mercilessly, and without the slightest remorse anyone who happens to stand too close to him.  Everyone loved this movie because we all loved seeing Liam Neeson circumvent laws that so often seem more a hindrance than a help, and get bloody, efficient results.  I walked out of that movie deeply disturbed as I realized that I had just watched literally hundreds of people die and I had relished it.  I can't tell you how many people responded "yeah, but they were horrible people!  They deserved it!"  Be that as it may, I couldn't help but feel that a movie like Taken played to an unhealthy place in human nature which ought not be cultivated.

Because the fact is, the moment you start rationalizing cruelty by any sort of reasoning, you are on the dangerous slope.  One of the great tragedies of something like the Holocaust or of Slavery is the scarring left in its wake--the mental and emotional backlash.  You take a group of people and categorically demean them to a point where their lives hold no value...what could you possibly expect would happen to those people once they're finally released from your power?  The hatred of the Jews for the Nazis or the blacks for the whites is a horrible thing.  Their lives and their children's lives for generations are warped and mutated by a hatred that is just as blind as the hatred that they experienced.

What I'm trying to say so unsuccessfully is that these terrible points in history often lead to reciprocation.  That righteous anger I feel, that desire to hurt the tormentors as their victims were hurt, those same feelings are felt by others and we try to punish the tyrants somehow.  They need to suffer because they made others suffer!

But what does that make us?  What does that make the victims?  Suddenly the roles are reversed.  And just because you were once a victim doesn't mean that you cannot become a bully.

The epiphany that I had as I was sitting here on my bed was this:

If you cannot possibly find any way to value yourself besides setting yourself up over another person  by stripping them of their humanity...how low...how little must you value yourself?  And how immensely must you loathe yourself?

That was my epiphany.  And along with it came the realization why righteous wrath simply will not work.  Why you cannot punish away that kind of bad behavior.  If you hate yourself that much--that the only thing that can make you feel good is to compare yourself to something you consider less than human--no amount of punishment or pain will fix that.  Indeed, it will but add fuel to the fire.

What can fix that?  The horribly beautiful or beautifully horrible truth is that love is the only thing that can fix that.  Love and forgiveness and acceptance.  If you hate me and I hate you back, that does nothing but create an endless cycle of hate.  But if you hate me and I love you and forgive you back...even if you hate me till the end of time, by removing my own hatred I have managed to decrease the net hatred in the world even just by a little.

My righteous wrath isn't gone.  In fact when I think about forgiving someone in a situation like that a large part of me revolts.  Where is the justice in that?  How can I possibly suggest that such a thing is even possible?  Honestly, it may not be possible for many people.  Maybe their suffering passed the point of no return beyond which they cannot come back without some recompense being paid.  And maybe that's good.  But just try to imaging for a moment a world where everyone loved others--and more importantly, everyone felt well and truly loved.  Imagine a world where everyone knew who he or she was, the value they had, and that they were loved by those around them.

Can you imagine a Holocaust in that world?  Because I cannot.

Forgiveness and love are the way to that world.  Not hatred or vindictive punishment or retribution.

Swing Heil

In the memorandum, Himmler also warned the police about young people who ignored German culture and preferred jazz music and swing dance.  These resisters were called the Swing Youth, due to their taste in music.  According to Himmler, the teenagers said, "Swing Heil," instead of "Heil Hitler."  He noted that the boys wore their hair long and the girls wore makeup and painted their fingernails.

Today I read Susan Campbell Bartoletti's Hitler Youth: Growing Up In Hitler's Shadow.  It was a fascinating read.  I hesitate to try and write a post about it because I don't think I could do justice to the topic without much more time and research, but at the same time I felt an overwhelming wish to voice some of my small thoughts.  Frankly, most of my mind is focused on the war more than the actual book.  That being said, I must briefly mention that, as a person generally uninterested in non-fiction, I was very impressed.  Ms Bartoletti created an incredibly well-crafted book that presented difficult information in a very engaging manner.

Hitler's plan for training the youth of Germany is a fascinating and terrifying thing.  As I read this story of indoctrination and peer pressure I just kept looking at the world in which I live.  The climate of fear and reactionism that allowed Hitler to successively strip Germans of their freedoms with no opposition (indeed, each new breach of their freedom was often celebrated as a victory) seems so like the one in which we live today.  SOPA created an international outcry that roused people from their somnolent apathy and their outrage has, at least for now, been acknowledged.  But where was that same outrage when Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act which, among I don't even know what else, allows the government to detain Americans "suspected of terrorist activity"?  This law was signed off by the president this month and is now in effect (insofar as I am aware...).  Setting aside the issue of detaining anyone without basic rights because I can only address so much here, the fact is that under a new and frighteningly broad definition of "terrorist activity" our government can now detain us, it's own citizens, indefinitely and without trial.  It may seem reactionary and extreme to imply this comparison, but I can't help but worry...is "The War on Terror" a good enough reason for us to sit quietly while our civil liberties, such an enduring hallmark of this nation (even as its reputation has suffered ever more tarnishing from the hands of outsiders and insiders alike), are chipped away one by one?

Ironically, I found a bitter sort of comfort even as I mused on these frightening ideas.  Bartoletti begins her book with a quote from Hitler himself

I begin with the young.  We older ones are used up...But my magnificent youngsters!  Are there finer ones anywhere in the world?  Look at all these men and boys!  What material!  With them I can make a new world.

Hitler understood the importance of the rising generation in the success of his war machine.  Bartoletti's book describes the activities the Hitler Jungen (HJ) orchestrated to get all the children involved.  She describes hiking and camping and summer camps.  She talks about the patriotic propaganda that played to the fervor of young minds.  Hitler had an immense gift for speaking, and with his nation's youth he used it to terrible effect.  Bartoletti includes several first-hand accounts of boys and girls in their teens who heard him speak.  They talk about how inspiring he was and how his words went right to their souls and captured their hearts and minds.  My bitter comfort as I read these accounts was a knowledge that the youth of my generation are immune to such insidious tactics.  The fact is, mine is a generation defined by apathy.

I cannot be proud of this safeguard. After all, apathy is just as dangerous as misguided fanaticism.  It was the apathy of others that allowed families to be dragged from their homes and put into concentration camps.  With enough apathy, fear, and carefully placed manipulation bad men can create a world all of their own making.  The fact is everyone wants their world to be ok.  They don't want there to be problems and trouble and issues.  It is frightening to think that something is wrong because that means that it must somehow be fixed.  Bartoletti interviewed actual members of the HJ and they talked to her about their inability to face what they had done.  So many of them simply could not accept that the man they had believed in with religious fervor was a madman and a murderer--not even when they saw the evidence with their own eyes.  People don't want to believe that the world is gone awry and that they have been a part of it, no matter how inadvertently.

But most of all this book overwhelmed me with the horror of violence and war.  Hitler took an entire generation and raised them up to be perfect soldiers.  Boys and men capable of the most horrifying atrocities towards their fellow men with little or no immediate remorse.  As I read Bartoletti's accounts of "mercy killings" and then the Holocaust I kept trying to understand how such programs could exist...and keep existing.  It wasn't just the insanity of Hitler; somehow hundreds of other people were pulled into complicity with it.  He was just one man.  Somehow he took living, feeling human beings and turned them into something less, something that was capable of looking others in the eye and inflicting every imaginable kind of torture on them.  How did he do that?

And yet this is not an isolated example.  To our shame, the history of human cruelty is as long as the history of human existence.  The worst part of this is the fact that it continues to exist today.  The fact that after witnessing something so appalling as World War II there still exists places like Guantanamo Bay.  That there are still terrorists and extremists and people filled with hate (or even more terrifying--people filled with militant zeal).  That people are still capable of taking another human being's life in his or her hands and snuffing it out because someone told them to...or because they told themselves to.  How?  How are we still doing this to one another?

I wish I had answers to any of these questions or solutions to even just one of these problems.  How does one abolish apathy while staving off misguided zealotry?  How does one subdue the demon within Man that strips from him his Humanity?  How do people conquer their wills and learn to interact with each other civilly and reasonably?  I don't know.  All I know is that even without solutions we have to keep trying.  Bartoletti told the story of various young men and women who rose up in rebellion under Hitler's regime.  In every instance they were quickly found and executed, their voices silenced, leaving what appeared to be little or no change in their wake.  It was difficult to hear their stories without bitterness as I wondered what it was for.  But I had to remind myself that the simple fact that I could read their stories all these years later means that they had some effect.  I cannot find the words to explain what their sacrifice means to me, a privileged and ignorant girl some 70 years later.  All I can say is that I am so grateful that they made it.  And perhaps, with that example to inspire me, if one day I find myself called on to sacrifice something of my own to protest against injustice, hatred, violence, or cruelty I will be able to make the right decision.  Even if I don't think it will make a difference.

Twilight: slasher fiction for the emotionally starved...

So my friend Danielle and I have this thing where we go and watch whatever Twilight movie happens to be out and we laugh hysterically.  It worked well for Twilight and New Moon.  She was out of the country for Eclipse so I missed that one, but I hear she went and saw it down in Brazil and laughed enough for both of us.  She has recently moved out to New York to be fabulous, but she's back in town for a few days visiting for Christmas so we figured we'd better get us to a late showing of Breaking Dawn 1.0

if your goal is mocking this seems promising, right?

What. The. Hell.

What the hell is that movie?  I'm sorry to be vulgar, but that is really all I can say, over and over.

So, for people like me who had no idea what was going on, here's a rundown.  I actually was just going through doing a play by play but it was taking way too long.  Especially when I realized that this movie is really just four things: wedding, honeymoon, express pregnancy, and delivery.  That's all you need to know.  They get married, they go on a honeymoon, she gets pregnant with the demon baby of death, and then she gives birth to said baby.  And somehow they stretch that into a movie just 3 minutes shy of 2 hours.

But that makes it sound sort of normal.  Oh no.  My first serious "this is wacked out!" alarm went off when she wakes up from her wedding night.  She's all gooey eyed remembering how beautiful it all was and then Edward walks in and asks her how bad she's hurt.  Then he pulls up her sleeves and you see his little fingerprints all over her arms and shoulders.   Suddenly you get a whole new perspective on abusive relationships as you listen to him abjectly apologize for hurting her, swear he never meant to and he'll never do it again, and listen to her get angry with him for...not for hurting her, but for refusing to hurt her even more.  What the what?  He sticks to it for a couple days and all the booty shorts and little negligees in the world won't sway him...until she wakes up from a dream crying cause he just doesn't want her...BLECH!

But that was nothing compared to Gollum!Bella of creeptastic pregnancy emaciation.  The emotional manipulation that happened between her and Jacob.  The bizarre militancy of Rosalee standing guard over PregnantGollum!Bella.  The sippy cup'o'blood to keep sweet li'l baby happy.  The abrupt change in Edward from baby loathing to baby worship.  All of it leading up to a scene that I don't think I'll ever be able to erase from my memory...the Vampire C-Section of Horror.  This is what happens, absolutely no exaggeration.  Bella, Edward, Alice, Rose, and Jacob are having tender bonding times when Bella drops her Cup'o'Blood as Edward hands it to her.  She dives after it and breaks her own back.  She falls, breaking her knees, and is about to splat her little head on the tiles till Edward dashes forward to catch her.  This sends her into labor, but Carlisle is out catching a bite, so it's up to Rose, Alice, Edward, and Jacob to deliver the little one.  Bella is lying there on the delivery table, back still broken, and the rest stand around at a loss till Edward says the baby is suffocating and Bella screams to get him out.  Jacob stands in as the husband, holding her hand and shouting at her to hang in there as Edward snatches up a scalpel and slices open her stomach.  Unfortunately, her uterus has become vampirized and scalpels are useless against it...so Edward rips it open with his teeth!  He comes up with his face covered in in his wife's blood and starts cooing over his new little girl!  Everyone just stands there!  No one thinks "Oh hey!  This woman has just had her stomach and uterus ripped open and may be hemorrhaging out, plus her back is broken.  This may be a good time to vampirize her completely...you know...while she's still alive."  Oh no.  No one even thinks "Oh hey, daddy might want to wipe some of the blood off his face."  They just stare at the baby, watch it take a bit out of it's mother, and coo over how cute it is.  Until Bella stops breathing that is.  Edward finally realizes his wife is in bad shape and hands the baby off to Rose.  He takes out a syringe of "vampire venom" and jams it into her heart.  When that doesn't appear to work he just starts sinking his teeth into her at random, a visual accompanied by a truly cringe-inducing squelching sound.  Nothing seems to be working, and he cries and Jacob cries and Bella looks like dead Gollum.  Oh.  But inside she's becoming a vampire and screaming her head off.  But you can't tell.  She just looks dead and sad.

I would post a picture...but you can't find any

 pictures of a scene that horrifying!  What does

that tell you?

You know what?  Forget the fact that Jacob then imprints on a baby girl.  Forget everything else about this movie--the bad acting, the horrible special effects, even the other questionable plot points.  What the HELL was that scene?  How do people go and watch that and still think that this is a great, beautiful, powerful love story?  What was that!?  I can't ask enough because I can't get an answer.  I walked out of the theatre so disturbed and so confused and so completely creeped out that all I could say was "why did we see that movie again?" over and over and over.