Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014)
A lot of people died in World War II. It's true, go look it up. Specific, trustworthy numbers are hard to find, it's mostly guesswork, but whatever, numbers are numbers. Suffice to say it was a lot. Somewhere in the region of 60 million people. Most of those people came from China, or the Soviet Union. And most of those from the Soviet Union were from what we now call Ukraine.
To give those numbers some kind of relevance you're unlikely to see more than 60 million faces in your entire life. Possibly the number will be far, far smaller than that. This kind of stuff all depends on where you live and what you do, and so on and so forth. Everyone loves statistics.
But something that might be worth remembering is that basically *all* of these 60 million or so people had, or were in, families. And that the fight for them involved much smaller numbers than the ones we use from both the comfort of being outside, and protected by the cushion of passing time. Those people who were fighting were leading characters in the narrative of their own struggle, one not bound up in numbers and statistics, but in feeling. It's all very easy to see the insignificance of the number '1' when you put it next to the number '6,000,000', but if we make that number '1' into someone extremely important to you, and then we remove them, you're likely to be more directly affected by this than by the facelessness of larger numbers.
Everyone with me so far?
Something else that we tend not to focus on is that this experience was, and is, not unique to one side in combat. When you're in one place it's very easy to get caught up in the geographical/political notion of 'good guys' and 'bad guys', but essentially all these people are working with the same struggle, and with the same inverted mathematic concern where small numbers are more important than big numbers. It's also probably quite easy to start taking the whole thing very personally, as though the existence of a war is one that victimises *you* in particular. But, of course, that's not the case. The war doesn't even know you exist. It simply trawls its way across the landscape, and sometimes people you care about are crushed. We experience it as an individual, but the war is a thing outside of anyone's control.
Maybe this is all getting a bit heavy, and maybe it's difficult to relate to. So let's imagine that you've had a hard day at work. You broke a shoelace, spilled tea or coffee onto your clothes, you've had some kind of nagging head or stomach ache all day, no one has listened to you, and when they have you have found yourself blurting out embarrassing, nonsensical statements, it's all been very frustrating. And then you're on your way home, and it starts to rain. Typical. It's at that point when a lot of people will say something like 'just my luck' or whatever. As though the rain had something to do with them and their journey home. But, of course, the rain is completely unaware of you. It's just performing a process that it has to do. And if you happen to be present when this happens, then so be it.
To give those numbers some kind of relevance you're unlikely to see more than 60 million faces in your entire life. Possibly the number will be far, far smaller than that. This kind of stuff all depends on where you live and what you do, and so on and so forth. Everyone loves statistics.
But something that might be worth remembering is that basically *all* of these 60 million or so people had, or were in, families. And that the fight for them involved much smaller numbers than the ones we use from both the comfort of being outside, and protected by the cushion of passing time. Those people who were fighting were leading characters in the narrative of their own struggle, one not bound up in numbers and statistics, but in feeling. It's all very easy to see the insignificance of the number '1' when you put it next to the number '6,000,000', but if we make that number '1' into someone extremely important to you, and then we remove them, you're likely to be more directly affected by this than by the facelessness of larger numbers.
Everyone with me so far?
Something else that we tend not to focus on is that this experience was, and is, not unique to one side in combat. When you're in one place it's very easy to get caught up in the geographical/political notion of 'good guys' and 'bad guys', but essentially all these people are working with the same struggle, and with the same inverted mathematic concern where small numbers are more important than big numbers. It's also probably quite easy to start taking the whole thing very personally, as though the existence of a war is one that victimises *you* in particular. But, of course, that's not the case. The war doesn't even know you exist. It simply trawls its way across the landscape, and sometimes people you care about are crushed. We experience it as an individual, but the war is a thing outside of anyone's control.
Maybe this is all getting a bit heavy, and maybe it's difficult to relate to. So let's imagine that you've had a hard day at work. You broke a shoelace, spilled tea or coffee onto your clothes, you've had some kind of nagging head or stomach ache all day, no one has listened to you, and when they have you have found yourself blurting out embarrassing, nonsensical statements, it's all been very frustrating. And then you're on your way home, and it starts to rain. Typical. It's at that point when a lot of people will say something like 'just my luck' or whatever. As though the rain had something to do with them and their journey home. But, of course, the rain is completely unaware of you. It's just performing a process that it has to do. And if you happen to be present when this happens, then so be it.