Saturday, November 12, 2022

War No More

I always struggle to decide if I should watch movies about war.

This choice is made even more difficult when my favorite trusty website, Rotten Tomatoes, shows a good rating for a film or show on the topic. (As my friends know, I trust the site's averages [sample size dependent] wholeheartedly.)

So, when I saw that the new film version of All Quiet on the Western Front had a 92% with 99 reviews, I had to do some discernment.

I did end up watching it. The opening scenes were mostly piles of dead, bloody bodies, and people stacking piles of dead, bloody bodies. That made me cry.

And now I am writing this blog in response.

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When I was teaching, I kept this classic poster somewhere in each of my classrooms.


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Here's a poem I love... Bees by Alden Solovy

The bees
Do not stop
Collecting pollen
When humans
Murder each other
With guns.
The bees think:
How strange,
How low
On the evolutionary scale
Must those humans be,
That they haven’t yet
Figured out
How to make honey
Or peace.

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When will those wildflowers in our backyard begin blooming?

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I taught in a Quaker school for a year, and we weren't even to put war into the curriculum. It's debatable on a lot of levels, but it's what we did. We also had a tribute assembly at that school when Pete Seeger died.


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Josh Ritter, one of my favorite artists, sings some of the best contemporary anti-war music I've found.


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Old Monk has a quote on the wall of her office...

"I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask: 'Mother, what was war?'"

Gets me every time.

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May we walk into the Advent season with the Peace of Christ in our hearts and in our voices.

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Let us walk in the holy presence.

Pax in Terra: A Meditation from Pema Chödrön

" One of the astronauts who went to the moon later described his experience looking back at Earth from that perspective. Earth looked s...