In my world, I have learned so much from movies and often movies have sparked an interest that burned throughout my life. It may have been Dr. Zhivago, Pasternak's great novel turned into a masterpiece of a movie, that inspired me to learn about Revolutions. Also, it taught me to fear them.
The aftermath of the heady days of the Russian Revolution the time after poets, writers, thinkers and hopefuls all over the world celebrated like people in love, was horrible. Not only the immediate aftermath but all the succeeding decades were torturous, and not at all what people hoped for and expected. It took a lot of people a long time to realize how totally the Communist Revolution had not only failed but had become a murder machine of the magnitude of a weapon of mass destruction. After the Civil War between the Marxists, Leninists, Bolsheviks, when the Stalinists took over, people were killed by the millions in purposeful famines and forced evictions. An entire generation of artists, writers, thinkers, and scientists and other professionals, were imprisoned, tortured and killed and freedom in most forms was trampled to dust.
The times after a revolution are always so hard, all the rebuilding of destroyed buildings and infrastructure, the collapse of food economies, the collapse of law and order. Not much has been written about the aftermath of the war on the ordinary people; where is the great novel about the ordinary people trying to re-establish the world on their farms and in their burned out shops?
Watching a new Russian tv series on Netflix about the Russian Revolution, I suddenly was able to empathize with the feelings of fear and disapproval of so many people in regard to the massive protests for BLACK LIVES MATTER. I think they are afraid all that collapse will fall on us next.
The missing piece is that there are so many opportunities for reform through negotiation, compromise and redress, that it doesn't have to go that way. The blessed placid beauty of peace and order can be maintained by a governing body that is ready to listen and understand the needs of the people, the proletariat. It takes wisdom and nobility and empathy for that to happen, but it is the way to peace and transformation with destruction and death.
Our leadership now is so blockheaded and inept, that all it can see is DOMINATION. What is needed is COOPERATION. When I was a teacher I took part in a program called Peer Mediation, and it so interested me in the visible efficacy of its principles and practices that I began to do a little study in CONFLICT RESOLUTION. I was convinced then and I remain convinced that this could be the most important course any individual could take and if enough people learned it, we could make a better world
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