The movie Yojimbo is just so awesome.
Mifune plays these two gangs against each other, and the movie is the epitome of the western, in my mind. I mean, not in that Sergio Leone sort of way, but in the gold old fashion way. A stranger rolls into town and just starts raising hell. He's too cool for any of the gangs to even lay a finger on, but of course they rough him up at some point. This only makes him mad, and makes us want to see him kill everyone just that little bit more.
Of course, he does.

Now I've been thinking about this lately, how movies can do such violent things, and we all just giggle at them. Actually I realized this while playing a boxing video game. In this game you can realistically beat a man so badly that his face cuts and swells appropriately. I found myself just toying with people during fights, seeing if perhaps i could close their eyes up, or just how badly I could cut them. I really found this disturbing, after a point.

So then we get to movies, wrestling, tv, video games...it's all made us just so, I don't even know. Well, there's that sort of video game violence, but I think we all get a little uncomfortable when we see real people get killed. There is that disturbing trend amongst the kids our age to watch people getting killed or injured on the internet. Just seeing how far we can go, what we can see. It's really sick. It's funny to see a guy who thinks he's the shit fall on his ass, but I don't think it's cool or funny to see guys getting gunned down by a helicopter, or to see a kid have his leg shattered, or to see a fat woman fall down and moan in pain. That's not funny. That's sick.

But I digress.

There's this news story going on right now, about this woman who's in a vegetative state. She's been like this for a few years, and is living on a feeding tube. Her state was due to a medical accident, so her husband has a lot of money from it. Now, he's trying to end her life. What's the method of termination? Removing the feeding tube, which leads to dehydration and starvation. Give that a few weeks, and she's dead.

Now, this is coming from a kid who's "pro-death" in regards to the death penalty, abortion, and euthenasia...but let the woman live. For fucks sake. Her parents are alive and willing to care for her, and the guy could just divorce her. He says he can kill her because she told him. Did she sign anything? If not, this is just a case of his word versus her's, but oh wait, she can't talk. He wants the cash, and he wants to split. I mean, this thing is going to get so blown up, it's ridiculous. Instead of being about patriarchal control in marraige, or about human decency, it's going to become about religion in courts, euthenasia in general. The republicans are going to run with this, saying how liberals are allowing this man to murder his wife, how liberals murder babies, and how god is angry. Well fuck god man. This is just about a woman who can't represent herself and a husband with an ass of cash. Give her to her parents.

I couldn't imagine a worse thing in the world than a mother and a father having to watch their daughter, already as helpless as an infant, starve, and be told by the government that there is nothing that they can do, because her ass of an husband wanted her to die. If she had signed something in the past, she should've been killed, humanely. We show more mercy to our dogs than we are to this woman.

Have mercy. If it has to be done, do it quickly, and preserve what dignity she has left. Don't make this a big issue in the house, don't let it set policy. Just don't.

-ccm