Munich, the movie

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MUNICH in KAMPALA, UGANDA
It was Sarah’s birthday, and we took her and Nate to dinner at a fast food Lebanese restaurant in a multi-storied mall. The food was excellent, especially the garlic sauce for the falafel…a pleasant beginning to a difficult movie.

Bill and I saw Schindler’s List in Bangkok; now Munich in Kampala. The movie, plus my readings, seem to come together...

I have been reading from Granta, an English publication, Joberg, by Ivan Vladislavic and walls:

Johannesburg is a frontier city, a place of contested boundaries. Territory must be secured and defended or it will be lost. Today the contest is fierce and so the defences multiple. Walls replace fences, high walls replace low ones, the highest walls acquire electrified wires and spikes. …walls tend to grow in increments. A stone wall is strengthened by prefab panels, a prefab wall is heightened further with steel palisades, the palisades are topped with razor wire.

And so forth. I will be including a picture with the razor wire.

So, I see that compounds and walls are important to keep people out. The more that we strive to keep people out, the more that they are going to come in. I kept thinking about this as I watched Munich. My adrenaline was so high, I could hardly breathe. Violence and violence…and what does that do to a person?

From Granta: Policeman to the World, by Daniel Bergner. A journalist writes about Mark Kroeker, the man who came from missionary parents, then Watts, Haiti, and Bosnia and in the article was about his trying to build a peaceful police force in Monrovia, Liberia.

Kroeker realized that perhaps the only justice that a raped Liberian woman could expect is the $2 from her rapist. Kroeker discussed the stoicism displayed by a Tutsi who saw his whole family massacred, who relayed,

The only thing that I have, and the only thing I intend to hang on to, is the law.

That line kept coming back to me during Munich, and the discussions, who should we kill, only the ones that set up Munich, be careful to avoid an innocent child, but in the end, what are the assassins left with?

Spielberg allowed one of the Palestinians to say, we want our homes, and you can kill one of us and two more will take up the cause.

Does it seem that life is safer today?

So, that was Munich in Kampala, Uganda. I just never know what I will experience on these trips.

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