Monday, 23 October 2017

What a weekend!
My son and his wife were gone so I ended up parking myself in front of the TV, watching documentaries, and a few free movies... I guess you would call it binge watching.  I watched them on Saturday, then again on Sunday, and today (when I was trying to make a list of the ones I watched) I discovered some more and watched them!

I like documentaries.
I have a hard time with movies.

I watched one movie (CRASH) that was on race issues in Los Angeles, where I come from, and it was rated R...  I really regret seeing any of the parts that made it an R movie.  Some of the race issues were new to me. I hate to think of anything like that really happening.  It's hard to judge a movie when the situations seem so hard to believe.  I may be in denial, but I hope not.  Our police authorities are powerful over us as a people, we can hardly wage battles against them if they go bad.  It's a huge historical reality.  The Bible talks about what happens when evil is present in the leadership of our lives... it's not good.

Some other movies I decided to watch, for the first time ever, were ::  Earth to Echo, La La Land (another one about Los Angeles), and Remember the Titans (another film about race issues, but from the difficult days when the government first tried to change the southern school systems).

I guess the bussing issues of that time are a bit familiar to me.  One of my sons had to be bussed from a downtown Hollywood neighborhood to a better neighborhood in the Valley.  It was a difficult burden, not just a matter of getting on a bus and getting off a bus.  California (Los Angeles, again) isn't quite the same as the deep south, but Los Angeles is where the Watts riots happened... a big race conflict.

In the years of my struggles, I have come to see that surviving takes up all your time and energy... it's hard to keep up with all the events that happen... the history that is happening in our lifetimes.  In poverty there aren't too many options to change the status quo.  Every month was a struggle to survive.  Not much else mattered.

One of the documentaries I watched (all of them were on Netflix) was about happiness... it was even called HAPPY.  Other documentaries were on food issues (something on Kid's Menus and another on finding Israeli Cuisine), drugs (Heroin(e), Resistance), the environment (A Plastic Ocean), free speech according to the media (Nobody Speak), and one about photographers (Refugee).  That's all I can remember.  I may have watched more.

You really need to watch "A Plastic Ocean" and start thinking about the ecosystem we call Earth, your food supplies (I think they said the oceans provide 70% of our food supplies, more for some cultures), and how we can save what all of us depend on for life.  I think it was too long, but I was binging so that may not be a good review.  I remember thinking that 30-minutes would be enough to show to kids in their classrooms, maybe on TV, and would get a better audience for the topic.  Maybe a series of the many important topics they touched on... like chapters on a single disk.  I cried, more than once.

The film on kids was great for me to see.  It had a project for the kids to plan their food for the day based on the Food Plate they were learning... 10 foods they would eat in a day, with 6 being from the fruit and veggie group I think.  I thought that would be a great idea for me.  I have been seeing that the number of foods we need to eat are not that many, and the true portions are not as much as we are used to eating.  I thought this would be a great challenge for my own eating efforts.  I plan to try it ASAP... this week at some point.  This documentary had some other ideas I liked, but I can't think of them right now.  It's late, and I binged on so many documentaries.  (sorry....)

Another very important documentary to watch is the one called RESISTANCE.  It is about how our favorite medicines are rapidly evolving into new strains that are resistant to the diseases we depend on them killing.  It takes death to make us aware of this problem, and it isn't going away.  GMO foods are another perspective of this same issue... how are they affecting our bodies.  The chemicals in plastic (from the ocean film) are also another part of this same issue.  We are killing ourselves without realizing it.

The humanity of refugees are seen in the film on that topic.  It is hard to see why we fault people who are doing what we would... just wanting to be safe, wanting to protect their children, wanting to be with their families and loved ones.  The horrible poverty they are forced to live in, the death that is forced on them by neglect, the ability of people to rise above the horrors and keep going...these are the facts of their survival.

So... that is what I did this past weekend.
What about you?  What did you learn that you didn't know before?

In Christ,
Deborah Martin