Today, Green Is The New Red, featured a video and a post, “Military Pull Activist Into Unmarked Car at G20 Protests.” While parts of me are quick to claim it as simply “par for the course,” in a corporate owned war killing common sense, other parts of me are not so quick to dismiss what actually happened. Consider what the fellow being “kidnapped” (I’ll call it as it is, thanks) must have thought and felt.
Scary shit, indeed…
The way in which humankind looks upon, and treats difference — especially within, but by no means limited to, our own kind — is deplorable. What would change it? Could it be as simple as listening more, and judging less, while hoping to understand and learn about someone else’s life? A life other than our own selfish existence? I’d like to think it might be.
This morning, again, in the third installment of CBC’s The Current, Anna Maria Tremonti spent the first bit of the piece speaking with Kristen Worley, “an elite Canadian cyclist who publicly acknowledges that she transitioned from the male sex to the female sex.” She had some very profound comments concerning “the stress that comes with the combination of intense athletic competition and equally intense scrutiny about your gender,” and she didn’t stop there;
“[Rushed Transcript] We need to re-identify ourselves — not just as the rules of sport — but a society, too. And to re-identify that this is normal human developments, that go on, and we have to really look at what we have created, the stereotypes, with the narrow binaries, we’ve created around men and women, and understand we, as a society have created this narrow binary, and sport is a small window of that conservative [there’s that word again] model that we have created and a majority of people fall into that grey zone. And it’s just that we tend to punish difference, for some strange reason we have this social reasoning, and we think it’s OK to go out and punish somebody, like a Castor Semenya for being a young intersexed woman, who has no idea she was intersexed, she was learning it as we were all learning it ourselves in the world media. And we protect the doping athletes, and put all these protections in place, and laws in place, and money in place to do that. But for some strange reason we go out and punish difference. It’s a strange social phenomenon…”
We desperately need a much better perspective on what it really means to be human…
This morning, while — quite fittingly — being stuck with an abnormal amount of rather uncomfortable needles (that being more than the “not many,” say), I had the opportunity to catch the last third of The Current. Where Jan Wong spoke to a panel concerning “Women & Horror Flicks.” Sure, being a fan of the genre helped, not only to take my mind off of the discomfort I underwent while having my jaw “acupunctured” (it would seem that “acupunctured” isn’t a word), but to keep me quite engaged, otherwise. It was a very interesting, and still a brutally conducted, “interview.”
I can’t explain my fascination with horror movies, other than actually experiencing feeling some rather primal emotions while watching a movie, of course. But I honestly can’t say there is much more there. Especially given, not only the inherent violence such a movie must possess in order to classify as a “horror,” but where that violence is often directed. Being women and non-human animals, especially.
Sit down and watch yourselves some Cannibal Holocaust — which has an eerily similar premise to that of The Blair Witch Project, now that I read about it on Wikipedia — and tell me you don’t have issues with the film makers “inclusion of six genuine animal deaths.” It’s utterly repugnant…
Last week saw the opening of the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, an event “renowned as one of the world’s top cinematic events, the staging ground for the top films in any given year.”1 And shortly before its opening, a campaign launched, protesting the “festival’s decision to host a showcase on Israeli films from Tel Aviv for its inaugural City-to-City program.”2
I’ve been reading a fair bit about this over the past week. Starting with the “group of artists and writers”3 who “drafted a letter of protest against the Tel Aviv spotlight,”4 ‘The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation‘, which states;
“We do not protest the individual Israeli filmmakers included in City to City, nor do we in any way suggest that Israeli films should be unwelcome at TIFF. However, especially in the wake of this year’s brutal assault on Gaza, we object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of what South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann have all characterized as an apartheid regime…”
And, yes, I’ve even read a bit of the backlash, well one article, at least. The backlash that mischaracterized the argument and largely fails to recognize the existence of the words, I just cited about. Not my point…