12 Years a Slave and Ferguson, Missouri

I watched 12 Years a Slave over the weekend, and I’ve been depressed ever since. I can’t blame it all on the movie I suppose, but the movie gave me that extra push into despair I needed. I knew it wasn’t a good idea to watch the movie. I’d been avoiding it ever since it arrived in the mail from Netflix. While I wanted to watch it, I didn’t want to watch it. I was scared. But Sunday night after putting off my husband’s request for days and I finally accepted the reality that I had to see it some time if I was ever going to get another movie from Netflix again, I agreed.

For the next two and a half hours I watched with a sickening sensation hardening in my stomach. It was like when I saw Saving Private Ryan and cried for two days afterward. But worse. While I knew it was going to be tough to take in, my fear did not match the the relentless brutality. I’m not sure anything could.

It wasn’t even the brutality — and it was horrific — that was the most disturbing to me. It was the planned, systematic and casually executed savagery humans are capable of and freely dispense. That it even was a system — conceived, planned and executed by a whole segment of society. It wasn’t the idea of a few, evil deviants.

Even animals don’t behave in such a way. Animals kill to survive. We do it for baser reasons.

 

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