rainy afternoon

I can't remember the last time I took a rainy afternoon to do nothing meaningful without feeling guilty. Ah, it's lovely.

I just watched V for Vendetta. Highly recommend it.

I watched something yesterday that was not good enough to even remember. Um ... oh yeah. Nacho Libre and The Lake House. They were both movies I'd wanted to see, but neither was good at all. Not bad enough to turn off, but I would never watch them again. These are all bootlegs from Stephen, so I'm happy to have a few good ones in the mix - it's always a crapshoot with movies and my tastes. I also have The Last King of Scotland which I actually liked enough to want to see again.

Hmmm ... the Crying Game connection there - Stephen Rea and Forest Whitaker. I really liked that movie. Not just for the gasps in the audience at that moment, but for the IRA tale.

Like the tension I blathered about before in a previous post - that of eternal monogamy and free love - I'm a warrior pacifist.

Really fervently a pacifist, multigenerational, it's in my genes - but it's also what I really strongly believe: that war and violence really, really are not the answer to any question besides "What is stupid and always does more harm than good?"

But this is because of who I am. Because of the privilege of my life and the power of my position in the world. I do not steal because I am not hungry; I do not kill because I am not in danger. I idolize Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez - the big guns who turned away from guns.

But if I were an Indian revolutionary or a migrant farmworker or Black in the 50's & 60's - would I believe in nonviolence?

In Battle of Algiers, there is a haunting scene where a woman walks into a bar with a case which she leaves behind - which explodes and kills everyone near.

Would I be that woman? Would it depend? I can think of so many situations that would sorely test my pacifist resolve, and I do not know how I would end up or what I would do.

What if my ancestors hadn't come from Ireland and I was living in occupied territory? Would I join the IRA and would I commit violent acts?

I don't know.

And what if the peace-loving is really just a load of crap fed to me by people in charge to keep me complacent? Sure, I protest the invasion of Iraq, but I don't lead armed mutiny to overthrow the president.

And this is all just another thing I disagree with the Tangoing Mennonite about - it's not better to appear mysterious. He deliberately won't answer questions sometimes in order to keep himself unknown and more interesting - at least that's what he says. It's kinda like what I did with my students a few years ago when somehow they were certain I'd been in prison but I wouldn't tell them what for. Several were obsessed with finding out. Any time their attention lagged I could bring it up for certain refocus on whatever I was saying.

But that was BS. In actual getting to know people, there's no need to deliberately mystify oneself. There are so many mysteries even to oneself. There are so many things I do not know about myself because so much depends. What would it take for me to become a suicide bomber? Or a lawyer? Ask me five years ago what I'd be, and neither would come to mind.

We are, in the right circumstances, full of vast untapped potential. We're huge vats of mystery.