Maybe It's The Movies

I don't know.

We all try to make sense of something senseless. 

I purposely avoided news coverage of the latest tragic events, because I didn't feel like I could handle the sadness.

Today, however, being Saturday, I was home, so I turned on the news channel, and it just all kept bombarding me, for about three hours, until I couldn't stand it anymore, so I switched it off.

I don't know if it's the movies themselves.  Intellectually, I know it's probably not.  It's the mental illness that causes people to do obscene things to other people.

But we're all looking for a scapegoat.

I saw the last Batman movie.  I would have never gone, but for the fact that Heath Ledger was in it.  It's just not my kind of thing.  Give me a light comedy any day.  Preferably, an intelligent light comedy.

Life is tough enough.  Do we really need to sit in a cold, dark theater and watch murder and mayhem?

But people like that stuff.  My husband and I watched, "Goodfellas" last Sunday.  It was violent.  I had to turn my head away a couple of times. But we still watched it, and we liked it.

Movies are insidious, though.  They desensitize you.

You think, well, I got through this scene; I can take it.  I can handle whatever they want to throw at me.

I didn't come of age during a time when blood and gore were the norm.  I was freaked out by "Night of the Living Dead", for heaven's sake.

Kids now, though, this is their reality.

I am all about artistic freedom.  Yet, I wonder sometimes if we've gone too far.

And, no, that's not an excuse.

I'm just trying to make sense of it all.