A Movie Review of Sorts

I sat down to watch the movie "Miracle" last night, thinking to myself that as a fan of hockey in general, I would like it. As the overly long movie crept along I found myself thinking of the opening montage, and almagam of video clips and still celluloid images of turbulent times for the United States. The spectrum crossed over twenty years of time, covered assasinations, presidents, national lies, plummeting fuel prices, and the general uneasiness of a time that is not far from our conscious. Somewhere in the movie the talk began of how a game against the Soviets was more than a simple game, implying, perhaps, an heir of the spirit of a country in harrowing times, a country two hundred years old, and yet still searching for an identity that escaped the grasp when Manifest Destiny was put on hiatus when the Pacific Ocean got too deep.

How could one not begin to think on the comparisons to our own time, our own world, again, not far removed from such a time. Today we face many images, daily, even hourly, which haunt our imaginations, our psyches, our very core. Today we are bombarded with such images, and yet haunted even more by our continuing wind grasping toward Manifest Destiny.

It struck me as quite odd as I watched the political leanings of big business Disney comment on the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, how it was troublesome to watch a country, perhaps one that we did not understand, nor like very much, for that matter, begin to impose its will upon another. It is easy to toss stones, to crucify, and to agree to revisionist historical account that frequently is a small fact mixed with a lot of opinion (certainly history is not a hard science!), and as I watched another movie villify an other (see: Red Dawn, Rocky IV, etc.), I begain to wonder why anyone would even question the vantage point of another, from another place, with another understanding, when they would query as to what business the U.S. has in Iraq. Does not at least a percentage of the population believe that we are in the right, just as perhaps a percentage of the population of the USSR believed that they were right? Or is it just easier to villify an other as a godless communist or a fundamentalist believer in a God of one form or another? Could it simply be that social darwinism, a term for something that has stood long before Darwin came along, is part of who we are as humanity? Survival of the fittest, self-preservation, whatever it takes to continue on as who we are...because anything else scares the crap out of us. We are scared of the "other."

So we believe we are right, because of our soil, because of our social security, because we believe in an ideology that has long been either a myth or that has fallen by the wayside.

Do you believe in Miracles?



DON'T DRILL ANWR!