A friend has loaned me 5 movies, with the promise of more to come. A wide variety is promised (but no chick flicks), and I kicked off the viewing with The Siege. Just like The Bank, this was an interesting one to watch now, as opposed to when it was released. A prediction of world events that did actually occur.
On the surface, this is your typical action movie - bad guys, good guys, turf wars, token female or two, deception, trust issues. Things that struck me about this one though were the faceless-ness of terrorism, and the typical human reactions of ordinary people as well as people entrusted with protecting us. Guilt, anger and fear were the overriding emotions.
I know that, when a disaster occurs, we need someone to blame. If we don't have anyone to blame, how will we know whose fault it was? How will we isolate someone/people with whom we should no longer associate? It creates such an 'us and them' existence that makes us feel safe and secure initially but, as the movie shows, develops into such a negative, closed-off view of the world that is really unsustainable. Is it possible to show love even when we are hurting and scared?
Even though we, as voters in a democracy, have the freedom to criticise our leaders, do we ever put ourselves in their shoes in this sort of situation? How would we react if their initial reaction was to forgive? And when our 'us and them' mentality actually hurts someone close to us, how do we redraw the line in the sand? It's all well and good to say, it's this particular group that we don't like - they look different, they don't assimilate, they act differently, pray differently, eat differently - but when we start to live our lives on one side of a line, we limit ourselves and further the problems that initiated the conflict. And if someone is technically from that group but has done enough to prove themselves to us to be included in our 'ok' group, at times of stress do we banish them back to the other side of the line or do we recognise our common humanity?
A lot of what I saw in this movie, as well as so much I have seen in the last 10 or so years, has shown me that we are all the same. Well, not entirely... But every society has its rebels. Every person needs to belong, somewhere. Every person needs to love and be loved. We cannot judge a whole race based on the actions of a few individuals. In this multicultural society, we cannot assign a person to a particular group based on appearance. I know it's hard, but can we ever produce a society actually based on love and acceptance?
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