Vashon goes to the movies

I woke up this morning trying to imagine anything but winter. But with the dark and the wind and the rain, even the coffee didn’t help. And then there was the news- consumer spending down over one percent from last month. I went back to the coffee. Then it was a few hours later and stocks were up, curiously on the news that consumer spending was up last month by half a percent. I stared at the coffee- what is in there? I began to think of 1984- the movie, and not the 1956 version with Edmond O’Brien as Winston Smith. No I needed something darker to fit the day, so it had to be the 1984 from 1984 with John Hurt as Winston, and of course Sir Richard Burton as O’Brien. And it had to be the choco (chocolate) ration scene where Winston rewrites the past so that the next batch of figures coming out to make it look as though the monthly allotment of the dark and sugary stuff is going up, rather than going down as it was before the altering of disbursement history. Then, an hour or so later i hear on yet another of those hourly NPR updates, that consumer spending is down again by over a percent, BUT, if you take away the drop in auto sales because of the end of cash for clunkers, then everything is a half a percent on the plus side of rosy and Dow stocks soar over 10K for the first time in a year. I guess it IS all about how you define it, at least in the imaginary world of economics. At least it wasn’t the coffee.

But what if you happen to lose something a little more tangible than money.  What if you are out for a walk or are digging in the soil and for no real good reason you are missing arms and legs and you can’t get up. This is something we don’t have to think about too much in these United States, but in many parts of the world, the land mine is an all too real surprize. From Bosnia to Burma to the current conflict in Afghanistan, anti-personnel devices are a reality that takes things away that aren’t coming back, no matter how much one skews the data. In Disarm, director Mary Wareham takes us around the globe to see the effects  of landmines on the human condition. We are also introduced to Jody Williams, who had by the late nineties done the work to earn her Nobel peace prize as a leader in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. From Colombia to Iraq, landmines continue to wreak havoc on the human body, and in Afghanistan, the prosthetics industry is one of the largest in that third poorest country in the world. Things could be different- Ms. Williams and others are working on getting these devices out of international arsenals so that the act of walking won’t lead to the reality of not being able to walk again.

We screen Disarm tonight at Cafe Luna at 7pm. I’d better get up there.