War and Peace

I survived non-violence today. I had to videotape some annual event on "A season for non-violence," which was this awards ceremony for peace promoters. It started off good with a weepy speaker who had adopted an abused child from China. She was a bleeding-heart liberal, almost communist, who refused to have any mention of the war in her house in front of her children. He daughter then saw images of Iraq with children, and hated the war because of the inclusion of children. (This would be my mother's argument as well, I imagine)

Then...it goes downhill.

We are "treated" to a cat-howling rendition of some Bengalese song which Gandhi said was his favorite. Sung in its original language. By Americans, with one native Indian/Hindi. It was horrible.

Then, there was some bitch who won the best essay award. I call her a bitch because I don't believe she believed what she was writing. She also accosted me before it started asking if I knew if there were any photographers. You'd think that this was a major event with a good essay, right? Wrong. The first thing she does is break up crying, probably because she doesn't deserve the award and she knows it. Eventually she contains herself, and reads her essay with much more weeping involved. First, she goes on about how the war stems only from cultural differences. She continues with some nonsensical arguments, and ends on a semi-joke by saying that "a buddy of mine in the COnspiracy Theory chatroom said 'Bush says were fighting against evil. Bin Laden says were fighting against evil. They're on the same side.'" Which to me was laughable. Then, she continues on how love conquors all, and gives an example of how some 4-year-old victim of a violent household was calmed when a 4-year-old girl had compassion for him, gave him massages and put her head in his lap. The bitch then quoted Spike Lee, saying "everybody is a little racist" and then John Lennon's Imagine. She then went on with more props used for sorting the difference between what goes into peace and what goes into war. In all, the essay was very banal and shitty. 4 people (including myself) were barely containing their laughter.

This all finished up with more awards, including to A Better Tomorrow. Some guy said that non-violence uprisings conquored dictators in all of the old U.S.S.R. states (like Georgia) except for one (which I can't remember).

After this, I check my LJ to find nakednerd has posted about how his bf and another friend are getting into it about how deserters should be treated humanely. Of course, this raised my ire, and I disagree with him 100%. Even given that I still am not completely convinced the war in Iraq was necessary, I still believe deserters should be jailed and sued.