This question is always important to consider when matters of conflict come up.
What is your driving force?
Is it simply to survive?
Is there a greater good that you are working toward?
If so, what is it?
What would you most like to help build?
This post inspired by Beth Woolsely’s article, which I’m sure is much better than mine.
What makes you who you are?
Is it merely the physical body, the material of which you are made?
Is it your genetic code that makes you “you?”
Is it the information you contain, your thoughts and feelings, which determine your identity?
Are you composed of what you have done?
Are you composed of what you will do?
“Love the sinner, hate the sin,” rests on the premise that we are essentially separable from our actions. That hating your actions has nothing to do with hating you; that loving you in no way implies a love for your actions.
There are some circumstances under which this makes sense. A person who has been forced by circumstance to do something they would rather not be doing, for example, or a person who has developed a habit they would rather not have through addiction or poor teaching.
But in these cases, the person’s action is clearly not in line with their will – the assumption that the person is better than their action rests on a clear distinction that the person doesn’t want to perform that action.
Can it be argued that we are defined by the actions that we want to take?
Where does this leave an unrepentant “sinner?”
Where does this leave the “sinner” who believes that at least some of what you call “sins” are not, in fact, grievous crimes?
Where does this leave the person in the sexual relationship outside of marriage, or the one whose spiritual practices you consider to themselves be “sins?”
Where is such a person left if you hate their relationship, or their spiritual practice?
If you hate these things, can you truly love them?
Or is the effect of this “love the sinner, hate the sin” truly to allow the hater-of-sins to behave hatefully towards the person, transgressing their personal boundaries, treating them with anger and disgust, and attempting against their will to force a change in their behavior, while still allowing the hater-of-sins to pretend they are not themselves being a horrible person?
Food for thought.
I’ve been speaking recently to a lot of people who feel that other Americans are out to get them.
“Why should we respect Christianity’s right to exist,” ask some supporters of gay rights, “when they don’t respect our right to exist? Christians told me for years that I was evil or inadequate because I was gay; why should I support Christianity?”
“Why should we respect gay rights supporters,” ask the Christians, “when they don’t respect our right to exist? People who want gay marriage are going around calling all religious people dangerous bigots; why should I support them?”
“Why should we respect white people,” some black people ask, “when they don’t respect us?”
“Why should we respect black people,” some white people ask, “when they don’t respect us?”
Christians still say “Paganism is dangerous, because 1800 years ago pagans executed Christians just for being Christian. That’s proof that paganism is evil.”
Pagans still say “Christianity is dangerous, because hundreds of years ago Christians executed pagans just for being pagan. That’s proof that Christianity is evil.”
Going back through history, we see this cycle again and again. Members of one group perpetrate violence against another; and the other group punishes their group for it for years to come.
It’s time to stop the cycle.
Find a member of the group you most fear, and talk to them. You will find that they are only bent on your destruction insofar as they think you are bent on theirs.
Find a member of the group you most fear, and talk to them. Let’s start now.
On the surface of it, it may appear that legalizing gay marriage does not effect anyone except those who were hoping to get a gay marriage.
And if humans were strictly rational creatures, this would be true. But in an American society that so often ostracizes and demonizes the Other, it’s arguable that the concerns of some opponents of gay marriage are at least a little bit understandable. After all, our nation does not have the greatest track record for having different groups living harmoniously side-by-side.
“Will we face threats of violence from those who don’t agree with us, now that we are a minority?”
That’s the only way we will ever improve our treatment of minorities, regardless of who falls into the category of “minority” in our changing world.
If there’s one thing I have been reminded of in my interactions with people this week, it has been that violence is a cycle.
“They don’t respect us,” say the atheists of Christians, “so why should we respect them?”
“They don’t respect us,” say the pagans of Christians, “so why should we respect them?”
“They don’t respect us,” say the Christians of non-Christians, “so why should we respect them?”
The cycle continues.
“They don’t respect us,” say the liberals of the conservatives, “so why should we respect them?”
“They don’t respect us,” say the conservatives of the liberals, “so why should we respect them?”
If we want the cycle of disrespect to stop, the most effective thing we can do is ensure that it stops with us.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
They are very likely to reciprocate the behavior.
***Trigger warning: If you are transgender, you may not wish to see some of the comments that will be quoted in this article. If you love someone who is transgender, you may not wish to see them either. But unfortunately, if you run in public circles on the Internet, it is probable that you already have.***
Sex and gender identity are not typically high on my priority list. I am not transgender myself; I am happily cis-female (that meaning that my gender identity is “cis,” which is chemistry lingo for “on the same side,” as my body).
But some things I cannot ignore.
Those things are the sickeningly horrific public reaction I have repeatedly seen in recent months to families with transgender children.
When it became public knowledge that Bragelina’s child, a biological girl, prefers to go by the name “John” and dress in boy’s clothes, public reaction was shocking.
People called it “child abuse.” People demanded that Child Protective Services be called, and the child removed from Bragelina’s custody. “There’s no way,” people said, “that that little girl wants to be called John. Her parents must be forcing their own agenda on her.”
Why do we have this reaction?
I can see how it could be difficult for a cis-person to understand what it is to be transgendered. For someone who has always woken up and felt like the gender in the mirror, you probably think that gender is determined by what’s in the mirror.
When roughly 99% of people feel the same way, and the 1% that doesn’t are often forced to hide the fact that what they see in the mirror does not match the way they feel, or are called “mentally ill” for feeling the way that they do, it’s easy to see how one might not understand transsexuality.
But why become enraged by it?
Why have opinions so fixed about a subject because it is unfamiliar to you that you are not willing to consider new sources of information?
I have seen this syndrome many times with people who don’t believe that gender reassignment should occur. “These people,” they say, “are sick. They need help. Being surgically mutilated or subjected to dangerous hormone therapy is bad for them.”
One person described their approach to transgender people as “frustrated compassion.” She just wanted what was best for them, you see – but they refused to accept what was best for them.
How dare you tell another person what is best for them?
And if your only concern is for their well-being, why become enraged when transgender people, after going through psychotherapy and hearing out your point of view, fail to change?
Why do they threaten you?
Why force your child to continue going to a therapist who tells her there’s something wrong with her, and isolate her from anyone who tells her that her gender identity is okay? This describes the behavior of Leelah Alcorn’s parents leading up to their daughter’s decision to walk into incoming traffic on the freeway.
She left behind a suicide note citing her parents’ inability to accept her and their forced isolation of her from anyone who did accept her as among the reasons she decided to end her life:
“When I was 14,” Leelah wrote, “I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong.
“If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.” – Leelah Alcorn, 2014
Would that behavior be preferable to Bragelina’s – that, or the behavior of CeCe McDonald’s family, who told her to “pray out” her love of wearing women’s clothes in early childhood, and then resorted to beating her when they became aware of her attraction to boys during her early teen years?
Instead of praying to stop feeling like a girl, CeCe prayed before bed to wake up in the female body that she was sure God intended her to have.
Why punish your children and tell them they’re wrong for any sign of acting the “wrong” gender?
When I was a teenager, two of my friends recounted how their parents had become very angry with them as children once when they helped their brother to dress in girls’ clothes. My friends said that “now they understand that what they did was wrong, because they might have confused him.”
How fragile is gender identity, that a substantial portion of parents seem to think that allowing a boy to wear a dress will leave him irreparably damaged?
If gender identity is so fragile, then why do so many people report having felt like the wrong gender from a very early age; and why is it that for many of these people, neither years of therapy nor violent beatings and threats of death cause them to feel that they are in the correct-gendered body?
A transgender friend once described her situation to me as “It’s like you’re wearing your coat upside down and backwards. Except instead of your coat, it’s your body. The right things just aren’t in the right places. And it’s tremendously uncomfortable.”
We don’t even need to discuss the medical and scientific soundness of gender reassignment surgery to understand why our society has a huge problem.
People don’t need to be getting surgery or hormone therapy to be considered “sick” because they live as a member of the opposite sex to that of their body.
Apparently, allowing a boy to wear a dress or honoring a girl’s request to be called “John” is enough to be accused of abusing them.
This issue was brought up for me again recently with the publication of an article about an ordinary family – no celebrities here – whose choice to allow their four-year-old biological boy to live as a girl per her wishes was apparently sensational enough to make headlines.
And again, the reaction was the same:
“That’s child abuse!”
“Someone call Child Protective Services!”
“These people should not be allowed to be parents!”
As someone who has watched several friends come out as transgender only to be greeted variously with rage, disbelief, exasperation, and general denial of legitimacy by their families, these comments made my blood boil.
After having seen people cry with happiness the first time their parents called them by their proper pronoun, I couldn’t believe we were accusing supportive parents of abuse.
“What kind of world are we encouraging?” I asked, “By so severely punishing parents who dare to let their children be themselves?”
Another concern: “Now, you say you blame the parents for mistreating the poor child, who you believe needs right guidance.”
“How would you react if your child came out to you as transgender?”
“Transsexuality is a mental disorder,” I’ve heard it said. “It’s just like anorexia or bulimia. You don’t let someone cut off their body parts because they hate them. You get them psychological help.”
That virtually all transgender people go through psychotherapy to address any body dysmorphia they may have before starting hormone therapy or getting sex reassignment surgery seems irrelevant to these critics.
That some teens kill themselves after being forced through years of “reparative” therapy by non-mainstream counselors who don’t believe in gender dysphoria does not seem relevant to these critics.
That constantly being called sick and wrong is probably a leading cause of suicide among these people does not seem relevant to these “compassionate” critics.
“Transsexuality is new,” the I have heard the critics say. “Until the last few decades, no one had even thought of something so unnatural.”
Except that those claims are not true at all. Societies around the world and throughout history have had examples of transgender individuals; many even had formalized social classes of transpeople, such as the fakalaties of Tonga, the “two spirit” male-female people of the Native American tribes, the hijra of India, the burrneshas of Albania, or the five different genders recognized by the Bugis people of Indonesia.
One very, very old archaeological site is thought to be the grave of a transgender cavewoman; the bones bear the marks of developing under the influence of male hormones, but the person was buried with female implements for cooking and sewing, facing the direction in which females were typically buried.
I would ask: “If both genders are okay, why is it essential to stick to one or the other?”
I would ask: “If both genders are okay, why is it so important to society which one a person is?”
I would ask: “What do you have to fear from the idea that transsexuality is a real thing that happens to a tiny percentage of people?”
Perhaps someday, someone will answer my questions.
But until then, consider this: if you have a problem with something that doesn’t hurt anybody, what is the motivation for your rage?
To put it another way, are you loving, or controlling?
I’m sure everyone has noticed that the divisions between Americans are wider now than they have been in decades.
As far as our attitudes towards each other go, we are all now either “good” or “evil.”
To liberals, those are “evil” who appear to oppose equal protection for all – be that through opposing expansions to Medicare and Medicaid, opposing the recognition of same-sex unions as marriage, opposing a woman’s freedom to choose whether she gives birth, opposing legislation designed to protect minorities, or through blatant racism and sexism.
To conservatives, those are “evil” who appear to oppose traditional values – be it through supporting government redistribution of wealth, supporting government restrictions on free enterprise, supporting the recognition of same-sex unions as marriage, supporting the killing of fetuses, or blatant slamming of those who hold traditional values.
You don’t find any middle ground these days. Everywhere you turn on the Internet, you find increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories about how one side or the other is conspiring to destroy America.
How did it get this way?
I would suggest that the culprit is a lack of understanding.
We seem to suffer both from lack of understanding of the other, and understanding of the self.
Do you understand why you believe the things you do?
Do you understand why you feel the way you feel?
Do you understand why you react negatively to some ideas?
Is your reaction rational? Is it the right reaction for the situation?
As human beings, we are very, very good at lying to ourselves.
Drawing from the unique understandings yielded by neuroscience, we know that the brain is literally designed to tell stories to explain our actions; even when it cannot possibly know the true reason for them.
In studies of “split brain” patients (those whose connection between the brain hemisphere has been severed, resulting in each hemisphere only receiving sensory data from half of the body), the left brain, which contains the speech center, will blatantly lie without even being aware that it is doing so.
“Why did you laugh?” the scientist will ask the left hemisphere of the split brain patient, after showing the right brain hemisphere a funny video which prompted the laughter?
“I was thinking about the bird outside the window,” the left brain will say, “and it reminded me of something funny.”
Clearly, the probability that the left brain independently laughed about a bird outside the window at the exact same moment when the right brain was shown a funny joke is low. The left brain shows no awareness of the video that the right brain saw; it does not reference it at all.
But it insists that it knows why its body laughed. It makes up stories about the reasons for actions whose true reasons it cannot possibly know.
I think this surfaces quite frequently in politics. More than once in my life, I’ve been speaking with someone who claimed to know why they held a given political feeling; only to have the feeling completely unaffected by the disappearance of their supposed reason for it.
Whether it’s someone who thinks they dislike a Supreme Court ruling “because it’s undemocratic” – and then opposes the same law when it’s passed at the state level by the people, or someone who thinks they oppose something because they care about children, and then ignores mountains of hard evidence about what is good for children – let’s face it.
We all do it.
But why do liberals and conservatives do it differently?
Here again, neuroscience can give us insight into what is normally beyond the realm of our knowledge.
Many scientific studies have been done to see how liberals and conservatives respond differently to stimuli. The overall results are this: that liberals want to believe that the world is safe, and conservatives want to believe that it is dangerous.
Conservatives have stronger biological responses to stimuli which induce fear and disgust; they react with more empathy to members of their “in group” as far as race, religion, and nationality goes, than to members of other groups. They cleave strongly to sure allies.
Conservatives are slower to recognize change and ambiguity; when shown a shape that slowly morphs from a circle into a triangle, conservatives will be slower to change their designation of the shape from “circle” to “triangle” than liberals.
It is easy to see how these traits would be advantageous under certain circumstances. Indeed, the World Values Survey has found that societies which live at high levels of physical insecurity almost universally cleave to traditional values like those espoused by conservatives.
There is good reason for this. If you live in an area of decidedly scarce resources, who your “in group” is could become very important. If you live in an area where you need to fear predation or disease, strong fear and disgust responses will keep you safe.
If you live in an area where the world is dangerous and uncertain, it makes sense to learn from authority figures and traditions which have worked in the past; if you live in a safe world with little to fear, it makes sense to discard tradition to try new ways which might be better.
This is probably why societies that live at high levels of physical safety and prosperity almost universally move towards liberal values. Characterized by the World Values Survey as “secular-rational” and “self-expression” values, these are values which create new things in safe environments.
It is easy to see why these, too, are good in certain circumstances. It is the mind that has little fear which gives freely to others; which widens one’s “in group” to include all living creatures; which discards tradition in pursuit of better ways, because it can afford to do so.
Both sets of values are essential in the right time and place. Let our wisdom, then, lie in recognizing the correct places to apply each.
Let us recognize what really poses a threat to our society.
Let us question our perceptions when we think that something threatens us.
Let us recognize what a fearless, giving heart would do.
Let us recognize when it may not be such a good idea to simply give someone what they want.
Today’s challenge: name three areas in which you are uncertain of your own motives.
What is necessary to make a better world?
One thing that is almost never talked about – and yet which seems to be a huge problem for developed nations – is whether we are wisely allocating our time to make us happy.
We hear about productivity. More of it is assumed to be a good thing. And yet we rarely talk about how we are measuring productivity. Is it in material goods produced? In money spent?
Are either of those things good reflections of happiness or virtue?
In his 2009 article “Can’t Get There From Here?” Stanley Schmidt points out that as automation has decreased the amount of human labor necessary for survival, instead of giving us more free time to live, love, and pursue happiness and virtue, we have created new, completely unnecessary, work for ourselves.
Consider our standards for social acceptability: material goods, which often don’t actually make their recipients happy, are often viewed in our society as markers of competence and virtue.
For all our talk about saving the planet, if someone doesn’t have a car but rather lobbies for better public transportation, it is often assumed to be due to some essential failing on their part; taking the bus is something that poor people do.
Likewise, take the matter of clothes. A professional worker in America is expected by their peers to spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on clothes each year. This is not merely a luxury or hobby; it is a necessity into which many people are forced to maintain an aura of credibility.
Take the matter of lawn care. Mowed grass is literally about the most useless plant imaginable. It has no nutritional or medicinal value; it does not improve the soil, but rather depletes it. Yet mowed grass, devoid of pesky “weeds” (which nearly all have greater nutritional, medicinal, and ecological value than untouched grass) is what is expected of a well-kept home or business.
Urban farming initiatives – that is, attempts to use one’s property in a highly efficient way to create a sustainable food source – have been discouraged on countless occasions by homeowners’ associations and zoning boards which deemed useful plants to be “unsightly” or assumed that a biologically diverse yard was a sign of neglect.
Interestingly, the practice of mowed-grass lawns was begun by Louis XIV of France, the same monarch who was later beheaded by a populace outraged at his practice of intentionally wasting resources while the French underclass literally starved.
Louis XIV is also largely responsible for the modern concept of fashion. Faced with a highly competitive noble court, Louis had the bright idea to set ridiculously high standards for how a nobleperson and their estate must look if they wished to be considered in good social standing; this prevented lesser nobility from amassing sufficient wealth to threaten his power or popularity, by enticing them to constantly spend it on material excesses that were, in fact, utterly useless.
In our modern era, we may not be intentionally forcing each other to spend money in order to keep each other down. But “keeping up with the Joneses” is keeping us all down! Time, money, and space that could be devoted to building healthy, vibrant, sustainable communities is instead being spent on consumption, which is not only bad for the health of our bodies and our planet, but for our lifestyles.
After all, everything we discard unnecessarily is not only an example of material waste; it is an example of wasted time. And time, I think we can all agree, is more precious to us mortal beings than material or money. Somebody had to make everything you throw away.
It speaks to the backwardness of today’s society that we are taught to think of this as a good thing. We are encouraged to buy things we don’t need, that won’t make us happy, because we are told that this creates jobs, which allows somebody else to get paid enough to eat.
This fails to consider the question: if those goods are not necessary to our society, why is it necessary to pay somebody to do them?
If all of our society’s needs are met without employing everyone at 40 hours per week, why in God’s name do we have the expectation that everyone needs to be employed at 40 hours per week?
Why are we struggling to create jobs – things to do that are not necessary, or we would not be struggling to create them – at the same time we’re fretting and bemoaning as a culture the lack of time we have to spend with our families?
The ideas that “jobs = money” is so deeply ingrained that we now largely view it as immoral to get paid – and subsequently enjoy food, shelter, and healthcare – without working.
Which would be less nonsensical if we weren’t openly struggling to come up with enough jobs for people to do at the same time.
Our society does not have a productivity deficit; if anything, it has an excess, spending millions of hours and billions of dollars each year on things that are not actually making us happy. We are told that this excess consumption is good because it creates jobs, without considering the fact that creating unnecessary labor is actually a very bad thing to do.
The obvious question that readers will ask upon reading this post is “how do we get people paid if they are not working?”
There are a few methods to consider.
The immediate problem with the idea of eliminating unnecessary jobs is that this will leave some people completely jobless, while others remain employed at the same gainful economic level. Some entire industries may be phased out or drastically reduced in size if people stop buying things that don’t make them happy.
And yet, isn’t finding a way to distribute time and wealth to maximize everyone’s happiness preferable to upholding the vaguely vindictive principle that “if I have to work to make a living, so should they?”
Isn’t it a more promising prospect to find work for these newly unemployed people to do that actually matters – such as community improvement or learning useful new skills – better for our society as a whole than treating them as useless because they don’t presently fill an existing production niche?
Isn’t it more appealing to reduce the number of hours of labor required of everyone by equally distributing work and resources, rather than creating unnecessary and counterproductive tasks to consume our short lives?
People will say that this smacks of communism, and that communism doesn’t work. However, there are two important caveats to that:
1) There is nothing about this concept that precludes a free market. It may communities to take a less competitive approach to distributing wealth – but making sure that everybody’s eating in a world where farming processes are distributed between the home garden and automated commercial farms run with minimal human labor should not be a large challenge.
2) Communism has only gone badly when it has been enforced over large scale by a government. These remote governing bodies, predictably, failed to anticipate both the needs and abilities of their people (hence causing “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” to fail miserable.
Historical practicioners of voluntary communism include the disciples of Jesus and Ghandi. Motivated by care for the well-being of people whose needs and abilities they actually knew, these people practiced communism quite successfully until they were eventually forced to integrate into a wider, competitive world.
“Competition” is the name of the vice, here. It is what is making us all miserable. Competition for the best lawn; for the best clothes; for the best paycheck to brag about; for the best car.
Competition for things which are probably the true passion of only a tiny percentage of the population; and which for the rest of us represent burdens on our time, energy, money, bodies, and planet.
Some top economists are recommending a solution to the problem that sounds downright blasphemous to our deeply ingrained “work = wealth = virtue” sensibility. Their suggestion? A government-enforced maximum work week of 20 hours.
The logic is surprisingly straightforward: in a world where we suffer simultaneously from some people lacking any employment at all and others working so many hours they do not see their families, limiting the amount of work any one person can do will force a redistribution of labor and pay.
A mandatory 20-hour work week would also fundamentally change the bargaining scene when it comes to wages; every worker would have to reckon for wages they could survive on at 20 hours/week, and employers would have to expect to pay them.
We might also see a “reverse inflation” (since inflation is largely a result of competition for goods and services among consumers) whereby the price of everything is forced to drop according to what people can afford.
Of course, as with the endeavor of raising workers’ wages to increase the health of your business, enforcing a mandatory work week cap would likely not be successful by itself. As with the restaurants who drastically reduce workers’ pay and then see profits rise, other initiatives would also be necessary to help workers, consumers, and employers make the best use of their resources.
But perhaps such measures could work towards the demise of Louis XIV’s influence in our culture. A mandated shorter work week could, at least temporarily, substantially reduce pressure to appear rich through wasting unnecessary resources.
What do you think?
This morning, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that bans on same-sex marriage violate the U.S. Constitution. As of today, it should be legal for same-sex couples in any state to apply for a marriage license. First, let’s talk about what this means from a legal perspective. A few benefits of marriage that previously were not guaranteed to same-sex couples include:
But we all know that this isn’t just about legal rights. If it was, why would anyone oppose it? This is also about national identity. American conservatives are frightened because this symbolizes a divorce of the standards of the U.S. federal government from the Christian religion. In theory, it has always been the case that church and state were separate in the United States. The Founding Fathers, though most believed in the benefit of religion, recognized the diversity of the early colonists; though all of the colonies were predominantly Christian, they had come from a variety of Christian stripes in an era when those differences were very important.
The Puritans had originally fled England because they were persecuted for following the wrong strain of Christianity, according to the Church of England; which, in the days not long after Europe fought bloody wars over the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, made them practically two different religions.
Others were Quakers, Masons, and other groups that, while Christian, were largely shunned and feared by the more dominant Christian factions. The 13 colonies were arguably as diverse in religious and national character as the States are today. And yet, somewhere along the line, America lost touch with the intent of separation of church and state.
Somewhere along the line, being a God-fearing Christian became part of being American in the eyes of many Americans. I would place this “somewhere” in the mid-20th century. It was in 1954, after all, that “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, which had previously simply read “one nation, indivisible.” It was in this mid-20th century, during the U.S.’s culture war with the Soviet Union, that the Soviets established atheism as a state religion and we tried our damnedest to establish Christianity as ours. Now, we seem to be rejecting that national identity – and there is a deep-seated fear in the minds of many Americans, arguably tracing back to the Cold War, that rejecting a Christian identity means embracing an atheist one.
It follows, in the minds of these people, that rejecting a Christian identity means that Christians will be endangered in the U.S., just as they were in the Soviet Union. Let’s not make them right. It’s easy to say “there is no risk of that – we would never persecute people for having beliefs different from our own.” And yet, the Christians who are upset about the legalization of gay marriage say the same thing. It is so easy to accidentally do.
It is not uncommon in Internet circles to hear Christians being slammed. I routinely need to police my own comment section – both for Christians being abusive towards non-Christians, and for non-Christians being abusive towards Christians. Hatred is a cycle. Let’s not continue it.
There was as much confusion as hype over the recent George Clooney movie, Tomorrowland.
We saw the previews and asked: “What on Earth do we expect for this film?” It appeared to reek of Disney and read like a kids’ film – the very name seemed to be designed to appeal to small children with no sense of subtlety. Yet the trailers also promised violence, suspense, and an apocalyptic dystopia scenario.
So what on Earth were we to make of this?
This same marketing problem has plagued several of my favorite films – unfortunately it is a malady that often strikes truly original pieces, those that dare to portray radically new concepts or use unique combinations of styles. Audiences don’t know what to expect it to be, so they simply don’t go see it.
Well, let me tell you what to expect. It’s definitely worth seeing this movie.
It’s difficult to…
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Breaking the Cycle 