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7 March 2000 - 11:41pm
I watched a video tonight. It was pretty good. It was called Savior and was about
this guy (Joshua) who worked for the US Govt. overseas. His family was killed in
a bomb attack on a cafe and after the funeral he went berserk and killed the
people he thought were responsible - half a dozen Muslims in a nearby temple.
His friend found him at the scene and together they joined the Foreign Legion to
escape from his crime. He became a professional soldier, a mercenary, fighting
wars and killing people and being completely detached from it all. Then he was
in Bosnia in 1993. He was serving with the Serbs, killing anyone and everyone
who was the 'enemy'. He was cold, detached, merciless - the epitome of a
professional soldier. And it was understandable. A flashback occurred at one
stage, just after he shot a small boy crossing a bridge to retrieve a goat. He
remembered back to when he and his friend let a small girl cross a similar bridge
and approach them. His friend offered the little girl a piece of chewing gum and
she smiled and then threw a grenade. His friend died. It returned to him looking
at the small boy floating dead in the river. Then things changed, and a girl came
into his life. She was pregnant and was known by his partner, Goran, who was
retrieving her from the enemy during a prisoner exchange. However, the girl didn't
want to talk to Goran as they were driving away, so Goran pulled the girl out of
the car and started kicking her in the stomach. Then when she started going
into labour on the spot, he got his rifle and was waiting for it to arrive so he could
shoot it. Joshua decided he couldn't let this happen and so he shot Goran. He
and the girl were then on the run, trying to get to a United Nations area before
Goran's men could find them. The girl had become pregnant due to rape, and
she didn't want the baby. However, as they travelled, she eventually came to
love the baby - and Joshua. He went from a cold, merciless killer, to a man
trying to save her and the child. Unfortunately he failed to save her - she was
caught by the enemy and he was hiding with the baby, watching and waiting for
an opportunity to attack the 20 or so enemy soldiers and save her (she was with
other prisoners - locals from the area they were in). Through his sniper scope he
could see her looking in his direction and shaking her head. Then she started
singing a lullaby that the baby could hear and cause it to go to sleep. It did, and
when the killing started and she died from a sledgehammer to the head, the baby
didn't make a sound - and his hiding was not compromised. He cried. I cried.
The soldiers left the scene of the massacre and he was eventually able to catch
a bus and made his way with the baby to a UN-controlled town. On the bus a
woman noticed he was an American with a baby - and an assault rifle... It
looked to her as if the baby was his and yet he was obviously a soldier. She
was curious, and when they arrived and he asked the bus driver where the Red
Cross was, she was quick to give him directions. He went in the direction she
suggested but he didn't say anything to her. He got to the Red Cross area and
placed the baby in the front seat of a UN vehicle and told it to cry - someone
would come. Doing this was obviously extremely hard for him, as he was crying
all the while. In the baby's blanket he placed a note with its name - Vera. He
then left and wandered to a nearby lake. He had been wounded earlier on, and
was obviously in pain. At the edge of a pier he tore up his military ID and
passport, and threw his rifle into the water. Then he collapsed crying onto a
bench seat. Suddenly the woman from the bus walked up to him, carrying the
baby. She asked him if it was his daughter, and he said yes. She asked him if
she could help him and his daughter get out of the country, and he said yes.
The movie finished with her helping him off the pier...
What a fantastic movie it was - and it was apparently based on a true story. I
decided to write about it in here. I didn't know why I wanted to write about it until
this very paragraph, right now. There's a lesson in that movie, and the story it
tells. It's a lesson about judgement. Maybe that's not the lesson it wanted to
teach, but it's the lesson I choose to talk about right now.
We all judge others for their appearance, for their actions, for how we perceive
them to be. But we never know what a person's past is, or what drives them to do the things they do. A person who we may judge as being a cold-blooded
killer, who should be killed themselves, may be on the very edge of redemption,
of re-discovering his own humanity and making a positive difference to this
world.
One of the American Indian tribes had a saying... "Never judge another man until
you walk a mile in his moccasins" (or something like that).
Every one of us has the potential to do great evil or great good. Or both.
I don't agree with religion because I believe it feeds on ignorance and fear. But I
do believe there is a lot of value within the Bible. Didn't Jesus apparently say,
"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" when people wanted to judge and
punish someone?
Let's all think about that before we start judging others, no matter what their
actions may have been, or how they are perceived by you. You don't know the
circumstances of their life, you don't know what has caused them to do what
they do.
Above all, you don't know their future. Give them a chance. They may be the next Savior.
Ok, that's enough of the pep talk... Let's get back on track. You're here to read
about my life. So what's been happening? Well, it's mostly pretty average, with
nothing spectacular occurring that I either haven't already talked about, or just
isn't worth talking about in here.
Work
Work is work. It's still going ok and I'm enjoying it a lot, which is a good thing.
Of course it is. It certainly wouldn't be any good to not enjoy your work, would
it? I mean, what's the point of doing something you don't enjoy? Exactly.
Women
Women are women. They're never going ok, but I'm enjoying that a lot too.
Hehehe. Hey, just jokes, just jokes!! (Now I'm going to get a flood of emails
from women about how ignorant and insulting I am. I have only one thing to say -
get over it!) Women are women, and men are men, and never the twain shall
meet. Occasionally they enjoy each other's company and can even share quite
a bit of their lives, but never will they understand the other.
Sometimes my writing takes me in directions I don't even think about. After I wrote the above paragraph, I thought to myself, "Why the hell did I write that?!" I
can only think it's because of this one woman in my life. Hmmm... no, actually
it's two.
Both of them seem to be hanging around as friends, and yet they are 'hanging around' more often than female friends have a right to. It's very confusing.
Neither of them are giving any overt signals as to what they really want, and
because I'm not interested in stuffing up friendships, I'm also not making any
overt moves on my part. And so the twisted game continues, with the dodging
and weaving and the playing of the dating game - without the dating! Just when
you think you understand women, along come some more women who just
destroy everything you thought you know about them.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother. Maybe I should become a hermit, or a dedicated bachelor...
If you attack apparent negativity
with negativity
you merely feed
and inflame the source.
It's always best
to take the positive
in any conflict.
If you genuinely love,
or at least
send kind thoughts
to a thing,
it will change before your eyes.
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