From someone who has seen a lot of dumb movies and TV shows it’s really hard to imagine that it wasn’t until last night that I actually saw the dumbest thing I have ever seen entertainment wise, and I’ve seen both Transformers movies! 

The show in question is the Starz original series Spartacus: Blood and Sand.  The first episode pretty much sets up the series, as most first episodes do, telling the story of how Spartacus, once a warrior, is betrayed by the Romans, capture, and turned into a gladiator slave.

This is the kind of show that takes bits and pieces of other shows and movies and tries to cobble them together to make it seem as if it was their idea.  Gladiator slave who was once a warrior: Gladiator. Slow motion, followed by quick motion, followed by more slow motion fights: 300.   Lots of nudity: Most shows on Cable now a days.  But, actually, that’s not what made this the dumbest thing I have ever seen.  It’s hard to make shows and movies about gladiators and Rome without being influenced but the stuff that came before.  I get that, I understand it.  It’s the first show so it might take a while for it to find it’s voice and its style.  So far, it’s not a good start but many shows have had bad starts before they found themselves so I’m willing to give it a break.

What makes this the dumbest thing I have ever seen has to be the fact that even though it’s very over the top everyone in the movie seems to take it so seriously.   There is fake, CGI blood splattering everywhere, there’s body parts being sliced off left and right, there are Roman people speaking with British accents and yet there is no indication that anyone who made this show doesn’t realize how silly it all is. 

Look, I like dumb entertainment.  Xena and Hercules were two of my favorite shows.  I recently watched a movie called Machine Girl, about a girl who’s family was killed, her arm was sliced off and she had it replaced with a machine gun and you know, I loved it.  So, dumb doesn’t bother me.  If it’s dumb it has to be entertaining.  The last thing a dumb show needs to do is take itself totally serious.  I don’t understand how the produces, one of which is Sam Raimi, also known as the creator of the afore mentioned Xena and Hercules as well as the director of the Evil dead movies, the Spiderman movies and one of last year’s best movies Drag me to hell so he knows how to make dumb fun and entertaining, could have looked at the final product and thought “yeah, people are totally going to love this.”   

Maybe it was the basement budget effects.  Trust me, I’ve seen better computer generated images on a first Generation PS2 game.  The blood spatter was just so fake it looked like someone made it with Microsoft Paint.  The background crowd in the gladiator fights looked as if they too fifteen cheering people then copy and pasted them into poor rendered seats.  It was distracting to the point of laughter.

I doubt I’ll watch another episode and I don’t recommend it to anyone who was wondering what it’s all about. 

I sometime wonder at what point does a writer take a taboo idea and think to himself, “yes, I’m the one who will write a story about this taboo.  I’m a good enough writer to take something that most people shy away from and I will write a story about it in such way people will learn to accept that it’s okay this is out in the open.  I’ll do it in such a way that people won’t think I’m exploting this taboo or I’m trying to shock people with it.  I’ll do in such a way that maybe, just maybe, people will come away from reading my book that they even feel inspired.”

I could never be that writer.  I know I’m not good enough to take a tabooed subject and write about it.  I’m not a fearless writer, I’m a pretty safe writer who wants to entertain, I have no desire to break any barriers or to show the world something evil and try to make it entertaining.  I’m sure I could try but I know I won’t succeed. 

And it’s not like I don’t think tabooed subjects shouldn’t be talked about or written about or dramatized.  In fact, I think they should be when the time is right.  Would it have been a good time to talk about civil rights in the 30’s?  Probably not but the 60’s was the perfect time.  Would it have been okay to talk about the homosexual lifestyle in the 70’s? Maybe but from where I sit that message would have been better received in the 90’s and 00’s. 

Which brings me to my movie review of The Lovely Bones.  I haven’t read the book so I can’t comment on it (I also don’t believe in judging a movie based on the book, I have to judge the movie based on the movie.) but I found the subject matter, the rape and murder of a 14 year old girl, very hard to get over while I watched.  Even though it was done off camera you knew what happened to the poor girl and even though she seemed to be in a beautiful world of her own making after she died it was still hard for me to get over what happened to her.  And, maybe that’s the point, maybe that’s what they were going for.

The story goes like this.  Susie Salmon (played by the very talented young actress Saoirse Ronan) is a very energetic 14 year old girl.  She’s loved by everyone, has a wonderful home life with a loving father (Mark Wahlberg) and a wonderful mother (Rachel Weisz).  She has one brother and one sister and, like I said, they are a near perfect family.

It doesn’t take long before the creepy neighbor (Stanley Tucci, who is a lot creepier than he was in Julie and Julia!) lures Susie into an underground fort where he rapes and kills her.  Again, you don’t see that and, in fact, they way they deal with it was a very good director’s choice.  The scene leading up to that was expertly done and, even though you knew what was going to happen (it was the plot, after all) I really, really didn’t want it too. 

What follows is I guess three different plots.  The first is Susie’s journey into the afterlife as she deals with her own death.   She can’t leave, she can’t go to the other side because she hates her killer so much she wants to see him brought to justice.

The second story is how the family deals with her death.  How her mom sort of just shuts down and wants to forget about Susie and what has happened. About how her dad is hell-bent on finding her killer and how her grand-mom (Susan Sarandon, who I love as an actress but I thought she played the grand-mom way too broad for the tone of the movie.  It almost felt like she was in a different movie, a family movie or even a comedy.)tried to hold the family together.

The third, and I thought the best of the three, was her sister (Rose McIver) trying to put the pieces together on her own when she get suspicious of her neighbor. 

I guess this is one of those movies where I have to go with my gut and my emotions as I watched.  Even though I found the subject disturbing the movie did have an emotional impact on me.  I could feel the pain of the actors, I could empathize with what I was seeing on the screen and near the end, after all was said and done, I was sad because Susie was dead.  I left the theater in a state where I was confused by what I was feeling.  Sure, I know I was manipulated, all movies try to do that, but it felt like it was more than that.  I connected with what I was seeing and yes, that means I did like the movie.  It’s not easy to connect with me emotionally in a movie, I’m way too jaded by the crap Hollywood puts out to fall for it unless it’s skillfully done and this movie, directed by Peter Jackson, was very skillfully done.

But, it wasn’t a perfect movie, not by a long shot. I could have done without the afterlife scenes that reminded me a Claritin Clear commercial. (Yes, I have read that criticism of the movie and has hard as I try I can’t ignore it.)  I really could have done without the final scene with the boy she liked, I can see where the writers were going with that but it was just too silly for me considering all that came before and what was happening on the screen at the time.  It was a scene that really seemed misplaced. 

So, in conclusion, yes I did enjoy The Lovely Bones despite my reservations, not sure if I’ll see it again if I happen to catch it on Cable but I do think it’s a movie worth checking out. 

First, I want to say that 3D normally doesn’t bother me and I always pashal to those who say it gives them a headache but this time, for some reason, my eyes got really, really tired.  It didn’t distract me from my movie watching experience but it was something I kept thinking about while watching the movie.  Maybe because most 3D movies I’ve seen have been cartoons that were only about 90 minutes long and not the 2 and half hour run time of Avatar. 

While watching Avatar I couldn’t help but think to myself, why did they spend 250 to 350 million dollars for a movie with such a pedestrian plot?  One of the things that made all the other James Cameron movies unique were they not only were a washed in state of the art effects but they had very interesting characters and plots. Sure, the plots might not have been far beyond the normal but they were at least interesting.  I didn’t find the story of Avatar interesting.  In fact, there wasn’t anything about movie’s story that surprised me.  All the characters acted just as they should.  The plot moved from point A to point B without any surprises and by the time they got to the final battle I was left wondering why I wasn’t feeling anything about what was going on.

Yet, even though I wasn’t emotionally evolved in the characters or the story I did find the setting, the concepts, the ideas fascinating.  I loved the idea of a planet where all life is connected and how the one intelligent race could communicate and connect to everything with little wires growing out of their hair.  Sure it’s very new agey, very magical Native American, heck even very Hippyish and I tried to roll my eyes at it as being silly but somehow it worked in this movie.  Maybe because as a Sci Fi geek I could easily imagine a planet (or in this case a moon) like that.  In fact, the more I thought about it the more I started to wonder how it works, what does it feel like to connect to all living beings, to be able to telepathically connect with plants and animals.  Even now while writing it this out I’m trying to figure all that out. 

And the visual, my goodness, the visuals were beyond amazing.  I do wonder if it needed to be done in 3D, I can only think of a few times when the 3D came into play but still, 3D, 2D, whatever, this movie was a visual delight to behold.  It cost a whole lot of money but there is no way you can’t tell me that movie wasn’t on the screen.  And the final battle was simply amazing to watch.  If I had any connection to the characters this might have been one of the best movies I have ever seen but, like all the books about writing I’ve read say, a story is built on characters the audience can connect with.  I could not connect with anyone in this movie.  I’m not saying it wasn’t well acted, considering about 90% of the acting was done with actors who were being filmed with motion capture dots placed on their faces which were filled in by a small army of animators, the acting was good.  I just don’t think they had a good script to work with, no good dialog to talk about, no emotional resonance anywhere in the movie. 

Maybe I’m so down on the plot because I’ve seen it before and I get tired of seeing the same plot over and over again. A mean corporation wants something and some indigenous race is in the way of them getting to it so they want to destroy the race.  The bad guys are always far superior in technology but the good guys are at one with nature. So, before they blow the good guys up they decide to send a cocksure, loyal military man to join the natives under the pretence of a friendly gesture but in actuality he’s just there to learn about the enemy.  Wow, do you think the military guy, after learning some hard lessons about the nature of, um, nature, will fall in love with one of the natives, change his mind and join the resistance against the military?  Sure, it seems like a battle he can’t win at first and his new tribe will lose the first few battle and they’ll blame him and kick him out but in the end he’ll prove himself as one of them and will lead them in a final battle and we’ll all learn the you can never beat Nature with technology and you must become one with nature in order to win. A very valuable lesson we’ll all think about when we leave the theater. 

YAWN!  Sorry, just writing that bored me.

Personally I think James Cameron saw he was about ready to spend 250 million dollars on a movie and he didn’t want that movie to be too far from what people expected from movies.  In other words, I think he dumbed it down so that the people would watch the spectacle on the screen and not think too hard about what was actually going on with the story.  It was a classic study in misdirection and, if you think about it I guess that makes Avatar the greatest magic trick ever!

While I was leaving the theater I was trying to think of this review and how I was going to write it.  While thinking about it I came up with this analogy:  Avatar is like taking the engine of my car and placing it inside a 1961 Ferrari 250GT.  Yeah, it’s going to look really, really nice but when you look under the hood it’s not going to have that much going on.

So, okay, I didn’t like New Moon.  In fact, I sort of hated it on so many levels.  But, when I share the information with people who loved the movie I’m always hit with the same response which is: “Well, did you read the books? Cause if you did I think you’d like the movie a lot better.”

That argument sort of annoys me mostly because I see the movies to avoid reading the books.  I’ve read Stephanie Meyers and I don’t really like her writing style too much. (I read the Host, which had three really great chapters, two okay chapters, and the rest was just a boring mess.)  Anyway, that’s not really the point to this entry.  The point is, if I need to read the book to understand the movie, or if I need to see the movie to understand the book then both the book and the movie failed in getting their point across.  I’m not going to spend two hours and 7.50 to see a movie which is more a compendium to a book, I want to see a movie that can stand by itself without having to read the book and I want to read a book that doesn’t rely on a movie to make it make sense.  Okay, one note, I am talking about movies who’s source is a book and not a book adaptation of the movie. 

I can think of several books I’ve read after seeing the movie that are both great books and great movies.  No country for old men is one of my favorite movies and the book enhanced the movie experience but I didn’t feel I needed to read the book to get the movie.  A good movie adaptation of a book will be able to get the same story across and will elicit the same emotional beats as the book.  In fact, I think the movie for No Country was slightly better than the book, but only slightly because both are great to watch or read. 

I can think of only one movie that I would recommend you read the book after seeing the movie to better understand what happened.  Atonement, a movie I fell in love with many times over, was a wonderfully streamlined version a book that was full of examination of purpose and motivation.  The book was a rich tapestry of getting into the characters head, of knowing exactly what each character was thinking at the moment they thought it.  The movie was more a blank slate that let the watcher try to fill in the blanks based on what was happening on the screen. 

And yes, I will admit, if you told me you didn’t like the movie I’d tell you to read the book because it fills in a lot of stuff that the movie barely touched on and yes, I know I just totally pulled the rug out from under my argument but, in my defense, Atonement is a great movie and New Moon wasn’t!

Maybe I don’t want to read books based on movies I don’t like because the book will be exactly like the movie which means I’ll have wasted not two hours watching a bad movie but one month reading a bad book.

Sometimes I’m always surprised that some of the oldest scams are still around and sometimes they still work.  Let me explain.

The other night I was walking home from work when some guy stopped me on the street.  He looked like a normal guy, dressed nicely, had a friendly smile, was carrying some papers in his hand.  He stopped me by saying, “Excuse me, can you help me?  I’m not from here and the people in this city aren’t friendly.  I’m not homeless, I swear.”

Okay, so far so good, you got my attention and you played toward my perchance to wanting to make people in Philadelphia look good.  I feel that since I’m from Philly I’m an ambassador of Philly to those who come into the city and when I’m in another city.  Plus, I’m always willing to help someone in trouble and hey, he’s not homeless, right? 

So, I said, “I’ll do my best.  What do you need?” 

Now, let me also explain my thought process here.  I thought he was going to ask for directions, which happens all the time cause Center City can be confusing if you don’t know it very well.

So, here is the pitch:  “I was just at the hospital getting some dialysis,” It’s at this point he rolled up his sleeve to show me this large lump on his arm, gross factor!  “And they booted my car.  I need to take the train home and I’m just one dollar short.” 

I smiled, both on the inside and the outside cause this really brought me back. It’s been a while since someone tried to pull this one on me.  The first time I heard something like this I was young, around 14 or 15, coming home from a friend’s house and I actually passed by a hospital where this guy pulled me aside and told me something along the same line.  Only he didn’t show me a lump on his arm, he showed me a pin sticking out of his hand.  I don’t really remember the story itself, I only remember looking at this large piece of metal sticking out of his hand and I remember giving him five dollars and honestly I would have given him everything I had as long as I didn’t have to look at that again. 

Another time I was at a bowling alley, it wasn’t that long after the first incident now that I think about it, and this guy came up to me and my friends telling us he locking himself out of his car and needed to take the El home to get his keys. So, me and my friends gathered some money together and gave it to him.   Imagine our surprise when the following week the same guy came in telling the same story.  I mean, really, who locks themselves out of their car two weeks in a row?  He didn’t come up to us, instead he came up to my bowling coach who pretty much laughed at him and had him removed the bowling alley. 

The last time was a few years ago when I was out for lunch.  By now the scam being pulled off was a bit more complicated and I’ll admit I was fooled.  This guy, dressed in a pair of sweat pants and sweat shirt carrying a gym bag, walked up to me.  He said, “Excuse me, sir.  I need your help.”

Me, once again stopped cause he didn’t look like he was homeless. 

The guy continued.  “I was playing basketball,” he opened his bag to show me he had a basketball in there and, I guess just for show, a suit and tie with a nice pair of dress pants.  “and I locked myself out of my car.  I need to get my keys from home and I’m about a dollar short for the train.  Can you help?”

So, I didn’t think twice after all, he had a suit and tie and a basketball!  I figured he was playing at the YMCA near where he stopped me I gave him a dollar and I felt good for helping someone who obviously wasn’t scamming me.  Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice and I won’t get fooled again!

Long story short the guy came up to me again a few weeks later with the same story.  I just smiled and said, “You got me a few weeks ago.” And I walked away, thankful for my hard earned experience.

Back to the present.  I looked at the guy, smiled slightly and said, “Sorry, I don’t have a dollar on me. Good luck though.” And I walked away wondering if I’ll be seeing this guy sometime in the next few weeks with the same story.  If I do I’m going tell him he needs to stop parking in Center City, getting the boot twice can’t be good karma.

Okay, a lot of people are going to hate me for this review and before I start I want everyone to know that I know I’m not the target audience for this movie.  I know that, in fact, I’m probably at the very other end of the target audience.  I know that when the PR people put the promos together no one said, “hey, how do we get 38 year old males who likes to watch Star Trek movies, goes to Science Fiction conventions and used to be really into comic books to come see it?”  Despite that I also know myself and I know that I’ve been surprised by more than one movie that I wasn’t the target audience for.  Julie and Julia as an example.  I know that movie was geared more toward woman between the age of say, 20 and 50 yet, I enjoyed it a lot.  The other day I was watching Josie and the Pussycats for the first time and, even though it wasn’t a great movie I was really surprised by how much I liked it.  So I do like to think of myself as someone who can enjoy movies not meant for them.  My thought is always this, a good movie is a good movie no matter the genre and a bad movie is a bad movie even if I love the genre. 

Okay, now that the disclaimer is out of the way let me simply say that Twilight: New Moon was a bad movie on so many levels yet it also had a few moments that I enjoyed.

I could really forgive the movie for all its faults if I actually liked the main characters.  If I actually bought the Bella/Edward relationship, and I believed in them as a couple I could have enjoyed the movie.  As it is I don’t.  It seems to me the only thing they ever talk about when they’re together is how they love each other, how she wants to be a vampire, how he doesn’t want her to be, how he needs to protect her.  I mean, geez, enough all ready!  I would love to have just a few scenes with them actually acting like people so I can get a sense of why he’s in love with Bella and why Bella is in love with him.  I seriously don’t get it.  I remember love at that ages is kind of strange but at least the girls I thought I was in love with I had a connection too and most of the conversations with those girls didn’t consist of me telling them how much I was in love with them!  Plus, I was only really in love with them for a few weeks then I found someone else to fall in love with.  Hey, 18 was a complicated age! 

More than once I wanted to reach inside the movie and slap Bella and Edward a few times.  I stifled a laugh because what I was seeing was just so melodramatic (SPOILER ALERT!  But maybe not really cause if you’ve seen the movie or the trailers you know this part.) It was the scene where Edward broke up with her and left and Bella’s in her bedroom and the camera is spinning around her and the months pass by and she doesn’t move from the seat.  I know breaking up with someone is traumatic but really?  I mean, really?  I don’t think the dad should have talked about sending her back to her mom, I think the dad should have arranged some sort of therapy session for her cause that’s just not normal and it made me just hate Bella with a depth I’ve never actually hated a character before.

Now, this is nothing against Kristen Stewart, she’s an actress I’ve liked in the few non-Twilight things I’ve seen her in, it’s the Bella character I hate.  I just don’t get her. I don’t get why anyone would want to be her friend. I don’t get why anyone would fall in love with her.  She’s just such a boring person.  Sure, she’ll make a joke every once in a while but for the most part she just seems to emote emotion or she’s a blank slate where you wonder if there’s anything going on behind those eyes.  Plus, she’s a tease! And, she’s a bad friend!  She sits by herself in the lunch room cause she’s sad.  She becomes friends with a boy she knows likes her to help her rebuild a bike so she can see images of Edward.  She gets this boy to fall in love with her (again, I don’t know why he falls in love with her) then when things get tough she tells him she loves him but she’ll always choose Edward.  She leaves her friend to take a bike ride with a guy who could have assaulted her (although there was no real danger) then when her friend calls her on it she gets all loopy and pretends it’s not a big deal. 

This is the kind of girl that other girls want to be like?  Really?  What kind of message is that sending to the youth of America!?

Then there’s Edward.  I don’t want to get into too many spoilers here but what happened near the end was just silly.  The guy’s 109 years old, I get that he’s in love with Bella and all that but come on!  You’d do that for a flighty 18 year old girl?  Edward, just go to a bar, get drunk with your buddies, commiserate and tell them how badly your life sucks, sit in a bedroom looking out the window for three months, then get over it. You live forever. You’ll find someone else I promise.

Okay, deep breathe Tim, deep breathe.

The movie wasn’t a total waste of time.  I really enjoyed the scenes in Rome (not the slow motion Bella running, but all that happened after that.)  I really, really wished the entire movie was about the Volturi and the Cullen’s place inside the Vampire society.  I would have loved to have seen how other clans react to Bella and Edward.  They were going for the obvious Romeo and Juliet thing here so, why not go all the way with it?  Very frustrating to sit through a movie I loathed only to find another part of the movie that I loved.

In fact, I found I enjoyed the movie more when Bella was in actual danger.  The scene in the meadow where the one vampire (Debbie tells me his name was Laurent) was about ready to kill Bella was really well done.   Her eventual rescue was well done as well, the chase between him and the Werewolf’s was fun to watch (even though you didn’t see the fight.)  When the Werewolf pack chased Victoria had me sitting up in my seat thinking, “man, if only they could remove all the Bella/Edward stuff this would be a pretty enjoyable movie.” 

So, there you have it.  I really did not like the movie because I just hate the two main characters and if they could just find a way to kill them both and focus on everything else it would be a good movie.  But, as it is, I know we won’t have that so I’ll probably dislike the next movie as well.

I’m a pacifist.  There, I’ve said it.  It’s not something that I just woke up and decided on a whim, no I think this has been brewing in my head for a very long time now and, to be honest, I’m not really sure how to live the pacifist lifestyle.

I did a search and found this from Wikipedia:

Pacifism is the opposition to war or violence as a means of settling disputes or gaining advantage. Pacifism covers a spectrum of views ranging from the belief that international disputes can and should be peacefully resolved; to calls for the abolition of the institutions of the military and war; to opposition to any organization of society through governmental force (anarchist or libertarian pacifism); to rejection of the use of physical violence to obtain political, economic or social goals; to the obliteration of force except in cases where it is absolutely necessary to advance the cause of peace; to opposition to violence under any circumstance, including defense of self and others.

Pacifism may be based on moral principles (a deontological view) or pragmatism (a consequentialist view). Principled pacifism holds that at some point along the spectrum from war to interpersonal physical violence, such violence becomes morally wrong. Pragmatic pacifism holds that the costs of war and inter-personal violence are so substantial that better ways of resolving disputes must be found. Pacifists in general reject theories of Just War.

Pacifists follow principles of nonviolence, believing that nonviolent action is morally superior and/or pragmatically most effective. Some pacifists, however, support physical violence for emergency defense of self or others. Others support destruction of property in such emergencies or for conducting symbolic acts of resistance like pouring red paint to represent blood on the outside of military recruiting offices or entering air force bases and hammering on military aircraft. However, part of the pacifist belief system is taking responsibility for one's actions by submitting to arrest and using a trial to publicize opposition to war and other forms of violence.

Hmm, reading that makes me think a bit so, let me break it down piece by piece and tell you what I think:

Pacifism is the opposition to war or violence as a means of settling disputes or gaining advantage. Pacifism covers a spectrum of views ranging from the belief that international disputes can and should be peacefully resolved; to calls for the abolition of the institutions of the military and war; to opposition to any organization of society through governmental force (anarchist or libertarian pacifism); to rejection of the use of physical violence to obtain political, economic or social goals; to the obliteration of force except in cases where it is absolutely necessary to advance the cause of peace; to opposition to violence under any circumstance, including defense of self and others.

Some of these views are way more radical than I’m willing to go. For instance, I would not call for the abolishment of the military or war, however I do think that war should be the very last thing on the very long list of things to use to help settle a dispute.  And I mean a very long list of things. I’m talking a list that goes from the top of the Empire state building down to the ground.  I’m also not an anarchist or libertarian, I’m a Democrat but that’ll be for another entry.

I also reject the use of violence to obtain political, economic or social goals.  I think that’s why I got so upset at the ‘town hall’ meetings that took place over the summer for health care reform.  It wasn’t that I disagreed with the questions that were being asked, I disagreed with the way they were being asked and that made me deaf to what was being said.  I also agree with the obliteration of force except in cases where it is absolutely necessary.  Again, there’s a long list of things to do before you act with violence but I do understand that violence is sometimes needed to settle a dispute.  Normally that’s because the other person wants to use violence and you have no choice but to defend yourself. 

Pacifism may be based on moral principles (a deontological view) or pragmatism (a consequentialist view). Principled pacifism holds that at some point along the spectrum from war to interpersonal physical violence, such violence becomes morally wrong. Pragmatic pacifism holds that the costs of war and inter-personal violence are so substantial that better ways of resolving disputes must be found. Pacifists in general reject theories of Just War.

This one I haven’t been able to wrap my brain around yet.  However, I do agree that there is no ‘Just War.’ It makes it almost glorify war but I don’t think war should be glorified.  In fact, it should really be demonized because war, 99.9% of the time, is a waste of human lives.  The only war I can think of that people might have an argument against is World War II.  I personally don’t think it was a Just War, I think it was an unavoidable one. 

Pacifists follow principles of nonviolence, believing that nonviolent action is morally superior and/or pragmatically most effective. Some pacifists, however, support physical violence for emergency defense of self or others. Others support destruction of property in such emergencies or for conducting symbolic acts of resistance like pouring red paint to represent blood on the outside of military recruiting offices or entering air force bases and hammering on military aircraft. However, part of the pacifist belief system is taking responsibility for one's actions by submitting to arrest and using a trial to publicize opposition to war and other forms of violence.

This is the core of what I believe.  I try to follow the principles of nonviolence and nonviolent action.  I think we stand a better chance of getting things accomplished by sitting down and talking to one another instead of bashing in each other’s heads.  I don’t support destruction of property, that seems go to against what I believe.  Basically, everything in the first half of this paragraph I give thumbs up too, everything in the second a thumbs down too. 

Now, of course, I know people I tell this too are going to throw scenarios at me that are unlikely to happen.  “Oh, what if you’re in a dark alley with your girlfriend and some guy comes up and grabs her and starts to beat her up, will you just stand there and talk to him or will you beat the living crap out of him?”

Well, I mean, gee, let me think.  How about I push him off my girlfriend and run like hell to the nearest place where there are people. And hey, let’s take a minute to back track and just say I will never go into a dark alley, ever.  Have you ever walked through a dark alley?  I know I haven’t.  In fact, can you even show me a dark alley and plus, why would someone be hiding in a dark alley anyway?  Are they just hoping some guy comes by and walks through?

The one that I know will be thrown at me (because it has when I had a conversation with someone about this not too long ago) goes along the line of.  “What if your daughter was raped and killed by some scum and you had the chance to be alone with that guy for five minutes.  What would you do?” The guy then proceeded to tell me what he would do, which is basically beat the guy to a pulp. 

Now, of course this will never happen (especially since I don’t have a daughter.) and I’ll be honest, I don’t know what I’d do.  I might just sit down and make the guy feel bad for what he did.  Maybe show him some photos of her, tell him that he took away a wonderful girl.  To me shame is something that never heals but a physical bruise will go away within a few weeks.  Heck, I’m still ashamed of getting my sister in trouble for something I did when I was 8 years old! 

I’m sure there are a thousand situations that will test my commitment to being a pacifist and I’ll probably fail a few of them but I hope that if I’m faced with a choice of violence or nonviolence I chose the nonviolence.  It’s not going to be easy, but I’m going to work hard to make it happen.