"Cops and Robbers"

When my generation was younger it was easy to know our enemies.  Days were spent playing Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, Good Guys and Bad Guys, and fighting invisible Japanese and German soldiers.  We came to identify our enemies through the movies.  Good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black ones.  Some called it propaganda, others called it patriotism.  During the 1970's, it was a lot harder to figure out who was the antagonist, as good guys did bad things and sometimes bad guys did good things.  It was a time when we lost our innocence; mistrust and questioning authority was the rule.  We turned on ourselves as illustrated in the comic strip, "Pogo" who declared:  "We have met the enemy and he is us."

I find it interesting that Jesus spent little time identifying enemies and he had a lot of them.  If he did speak of enemies it was usually in light of transforming them into friends and not stoning them into pulp.  I also find it interesting that one of Israel's religious teachers asked Jesus "Who is my neighbor?"  Maybe that's because the teacher was quite blind when it came to looking for good in the world.  He certainly knew his enemies though.  It's fascinating that in the story that Jesus told in response to his question that it was this teacher's enemy who became the hero.

I recently experienced Steven Spielberg's movie, "The War Horse." and I'm still shaking.  We all left the theater silently and in the dark.  There were a lot of senior citizens at the showing, and my guess is that many of them knew firsthand the horrors of war, most likely in Vietnam.  The movie ends with a son returning home from WWI but not after many had died, and after experiencing the carnage of gas canisters and horrendous trench warfare.   (Over 35 million civilians and military were killed in WWI.)  His mother hugs him, his father, a Boar War veteran shakes his hand.  Father and son now understand each other's pain and what each now suffer in silence.  The three are silhouetted in a huge dark sunset.  They are together again, but things will never be the same.  How could they?  Spielberg is pretty clear at pointing out the enemy and he is in neither trench, nor on either side.  For Spielberg, the enemy is War.  I concur.

God Bless You,

John Logan

jalogan@wpa.net