Personal and professional musings of a person in Springfield, Illinois. Sometimes I'm just expressing some opinions about current events. Sometimes I'm remembering things in my life.
Monday, September 06, 2010
Centurion
Last night we watched Centurion. It wasn't a good movie. It was an adventure war film set in early second century Scotland. Lots of action and blood and violence. Very little else.
A few months ago I watched the movie "Gladiator" with my family. I had seen it before, and was annoyed by the historical inaccuracy, but thought that everyone might enjoy it. It upset my daughter extremely. While I was myself upset and sorry that I upset Meret, who is 10, I think that it is sort of a good thing that she is sensitive to the death of characters in movies, and doesn't regard it so casually. We are doing well in this country in sensitizing ourselves to the deaths of US soldiers; we have been at war for nearly nine years now, and our casualty rates have been, historically speaking, quite low, averaging well under 1000 a year. Still, people are upset, it is reported in the news, and the individual names of the soldiers are often mentioned. In WW1, it took about 15 minutes for 1000 soldiers to get killed, and no one cared as long as they got their liberty sausage. Can you imagine if they read out every US death during Vietnam? No one thought to do it. Now if we can only start to work on sensitizing the public to deaths of civilians, and even maybe the enemy, then we will be in a much better place.
1 comment:
A few months ago I watched the movie "Gladiator" with my family. I had seen it before, and was annoyed by the historical inaccuracy, but thought that everyone might enjoy it. It upset my daughter extremely. While I was myself upset and sorry that I upset Meret, who is 10, I think that it is sort of a good thing that she is sensitive to the death of characters in movies, and doesn't regard it so casually.
We are doing well in this country in sensitizing ourselves to the deaths of US soldiers; we have been at war for nearly nine years now, and our casualty rates have been, historically speaking, quite low, averaging well under 1000 a year. Still, people are upset, it is reported in the news, and the individual names of the soldiers are often mentioned. In WW1, it took about 15 minutes for 1000 soldiers to get killed, and no one cared as long as they got their liberty sausage. Can you imagine if they read out every US death during Vietnam? No one thought to do it. Now if we can only start to work on sensitizing the public to deaths of civilians, and even maybe the enemy, then we will be in a much better place.
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