Last night I saw Hotel Rwanda, and it won’t leave me alone.  I know this sounds a little cliché-ish, but it is a movie that everyone should see.  What happened in Rwanda in 1994 is probably the most horrible thing that’s happened in my lifetime.  This movie watches like a documentary, I felt like I was there.  I wanted to cry for the things being done to human beings.  This movie conveys things I don’t know if I have in me, the courage, the ability to survive, and it’s basically a true story.  So go see it, to see it is to live it, and that makes it more than a good movie, it is something better.

Enough of the praising the movie…I only hope I conveyed how good it is.  Now on to the allegedly deep study of human nature.

I struggle to understand how you can hate someone enough to kill them because of what they are.  I can see wanting to kill someone who has done something horrible to you personally, I don’t think its right, but I can understand it.  I don’t understand how you can hate because someone is born a different race or religion.  And to hate enough to kill because of it?  How is that possible?  What makes a person, or group of people, decide that they have to kill all the children of a race so there won’t be another generation of them.  You don’t know them, you’re only motivation is that they are ‘the other’.  They aren’t of your group, your town, your parish.  They are different.

So what?

Can you hate because someone isn’t like you?  Because they walk differently?  Pray differently?  I can’t.  I understand that people are misled; all their problems are blamed on a certain group.  Their lack of food on the table, not catching a taxi, everything that doesn’t go right, comes down to a certain group.  I don’t know, I still don’t understand it. 

They say to forgive is divine.  Countries like Rwanda and South Africa allow people involved in these acts of murder and rape to come forward and confess the horrors they have done to the people they did them to, and they are forgiven and not persecuted.  How can you be so strong as to forgive the men who killed your children and raped and murdered your wife?  Would I have the strength to do something like that?  I hope I never have to find out, because I fear that I would find revenge, not forgiveness in my soul.

Does that lower me to their level?  Is a crime of revenge any more justifiable than a crime of hatred?  The motive is different, but the result is the same. 

That went all over the place, too much free thought, didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped.  Work has been pretty busy the past few weeks.  I’m now helping to train another guy in my department who started a few weeks ago.  It’s kind of neat.  I find the busier I am the less time I have to feel sorry for myself, so I just keep moving and don’t think about things.  Definitely not the healthiest way to deal with it. 

I’m off to upstate New York to visit a sick relative.  There have been a lot of deaths in my family in the past year, it isn’t good.  My cousin Michael died a few weeks ago and I met with some of my estranged family members, which was, as always, interesting.  See my Dad doesn’t talk to anyone in his family since his parents died, so I don’t know any of them.  So I went alone to pay my respects…well, like I said, it was interesting.

I really need to vent more, since I have no one to talk to about things at the moment.  I’m sorry