Meandering Post

Welcome to the land of whining...I am sooooo sick, I could just die. Seriously. Whine, whine, wimper. I really do not make a good sick person. I hate having to give in to it, rest, drink plenty of fluids and so on. Being sick is such a waste of time and frustrating because you just have to let it run its course no matter how annoying it is.

As a result of coughing so much (as in hacking up a lung) I couldn't lay down last night to sleep, so I wound up watching an old black and white movie about WWll. When you rely on rabbit ears (antennae) for TV reception, there's not much to choose from late at night. So I saw "Battle of the Coral Sea" circa 1959. It had so many cliches in it that it was actually watchable! Lol!

I knew I had to write about it the second I saw this:  we're inside a WWll submarine and the air is totally stagnant as you can imagine. So there we have Cliff Robertson, the Commander puffing away on a cigarette! I almost died laughing at how hokey old movies can be. The plot reads as follows:  "A Eurasian girl helps a U. S. submarine commander and two others escape from a Japanese island prison". Story lines don't get much more predictable than that. According to the "Zap2It" guide for TV it starred Cliff Robertson, Gia Scala, Teru Shimada and Paul Wendkos.

Actually it was quite a nice ride down nostalgia lane, grade B acting aside. 1959 doesn't seem that long ago and yet 52 years, five plus decades, half a century have passed in a blink of an eye. The ethics, attitudes and beliefs of that era don't exist any longer; well, maybe they do in some people and places, but it's hard to see these days. In the case of some stereotypical attitudes and beliefs, that's good, but there was a kind of inexplicable, unspoken belief that if you do right, right will overcome. Heck, look at all the shows today about justice/criminology, they're all pure fiction. In reality, nothing like that exists in today's justice system (okay, I could really go off on a tangent right now, but won't).

I think every generation goes through this kind of realization at some point. I recall my dad telling stories of how back in the first Great Depression, bread only cost a dime, but no one had a dime. As you read back through history, be it factual history or historical fiction (which I enjoy), you can see a pattern of each generation looking back in longing to a past that was more peaceful, gracious and safe. Perhaps that's what one should think about when getting somewhat despondent about the current state of the world today where it seems there's always uncertainty, fear and regret. Maybe that's the lesson, not to let what seems overwhelming get to you. Each generation seems worse as you live through it, but it's all proportionate.

Look at all the wars, previously unimagined and unimaginable that those who lived from 1900 to 1950 were witness to. Each was a new and unanticipated threat to life as one knew it. Think of the natural disasters from that occurred too and those prior to that in the 19th century. Yet, somehow each generation survived for the most part. So maybe, in a sense, it's true that nothing is really new, it's just the past in a different suit or costume and now it's our turn to act out this round of the play.