why do fireflies have to die so fast?
Just watched Grave of the Fireflies. I think all my fellow US History students who keep begging the teacher to let us watch Pearl Harbor every 3 seconds because they think it's an "awesome" movie ("awesome" meaning it has big FX and guns and things blowing up) should all be forced to watch Grave of the Fireflies in a double-feature with Pearl Harbor. I don't think a single one of them has ever thought of Japan as anything but a faceless, automaton enemy who we happened to bomb in WWII. It disgusts me to watch such ignorance thriving in the classroom. I mean, school, of all places -- why can't anyone even make an attempt to think of history as something other than an excuse to thump a Bible and shout "Support our troops!" at thin air?
I've decided that I like history. History is fascinating and scary and probably more worth learning than any other subject out there. (It's still not my favorite subject, but favorite is something entirely different from worthy.) I've also concluded that what I don't like is being taught rote history by nationalist bigots, and that's why I've been suffering under the delusion that I don't like history for all these years.
The winners write the history books, but no matter where you go in this world, the "other side" is always the "bad" side. The more objective I get and the more perspectives I get a chance to see from, the more I find that I've been suppressed by the educational system without ever even realizing it. I don't think they even realize how much they're suppressing. Not facts, I mean, just points of view. I've always known the facts; I've been taught all the right dates and names and battles and figures. But what no one ever bothered to teach me was how to think about the other guy's situation, or what the other country was like after we bombed it, or the foreign customs that led to certain descisions that seem alien to us Americans. Movies like Grave of the Fireflies and Pearl Harbor provide isolated fragments of these vital aspects of history, and I absolutely respect them for that (except when they get their facts wrong), but it's not nearly enough. What young people today (and some old people, too) really need is the ability to think around corners and perceive life as it is and life as it was as the same thing, all from a thousand different angles.
*sigh* History class bothers me. Every day we go in and take notes and the teacher lectures for an hour about things that are instantly twisted and misinterpreted and misunderstood by the student body, all of whom have been so desensitized by modern culture that they don't -- that they can't -- feel the real impact of the words being thrown at them. And then they memorize the notes, and the act of memorization drains all the life out of the words, so that critical thought is even more impossible.
We're starting to study the World Wars, and there's this air throughout the room of "Oh, this is real. This actually happened. These dates have 19-- in them, which makes them more real because I was born on a date that had a 19-- in it."
But the French Revolution? Reign of the Tokugawa Shogunate? Trade routes in ancient Kush and Kiev? The Medeival era, beyond a hint of Shakespeare and maybe one or two summer blockbusters? As far as most people I know are concerned, they might as well have been made up. The most anyone knows about them is what they've read in Dickens, or what they've seen in anime -- and that includes me. There's no way to really learn history unless you teach it to yourself, but what I'm slowly and painfully beginning to realize is that hardly anyone cares enough to try.
*blinks at long post*
I don't know how I managed to get all this out of what was supposed to be like a two-sentence review of a movie... I'm just talented like that, I guess.
Anyway, Grave of the Fireflies = excellent movie. Everyone should watch it. Bring Kleenex, turn your brain on, and prepare to learn a little history whether you want to or not.
-Rave
I've decided that I like history. History is fascinating and scary and probably more worth learning than any other subject out there. (It's still not my favorite subject, but favorite is something entirely different from worthy.) I've also concluded that what I don't like is being taught rote history by nationalist bigots, and that's why I've been suffering under the delusion that I don't like history for all these years.
The winners write the history books, but no matter where you go in this world, the "other side" is always the "bad" side. The more objective I get and the more perspectives I get a chance to see from, the more I find that I've been suppressed by the educational system without ever even realizing it. I don't think they even realize how much they're suppressing. Not facts, I mean, just points of view. I've always known the facts; I've been taught all the right dates and names and battles and figures. But what no one ever bothered to teach me was how to think about the other guy's situation, or what the other country was like after we bombed it, or the foreign customs that led to certain descisions that seem alien to us Americans. Movies like Grave of the Fireflies and Pearl Harbor provide isolated fragments of these vital aspects of history, and I absolutely respect them for that (except when they get their facts wrong), but it's not nearly enough. What young people today (and some old people, too) really need is the ability to think around corners and perceive life as it is and life as it was as the same thing, all from a thousand different angles.
*sigh* History class bothers me. Every day we go in and take notes and the teacher lectures for an hour about things that are instantly twisted and misinterpreted and misunderstood by the student body, all of whom have been so desensitized by modern culture that they don't -- that they can't -- feel the real impact of the words being thrown at them. And then they memorize the notes, and the act of memorization drains all the life out of the words, so that critical thought is even more impossible.
We're starting to study the World Wars, and there's this air throughout the room of "Oh, this is real. This actually happened. These dates have 19-- in them, which makes them more real because I was born on a date that had a 19-- in it."
But the French Revolution? Reign of the Tokugawa Shogunate? Trade routes in ancient Kush and Kiev? The Medeival era, beyond a hint of Shakespeare and maybe one or two summer blockbusters? As far as most people I know are concerned, they might as well have been made up. The most anyone knows about them is what they've read in Dickens, or what they've seen in anime -- and that includes me. There's no way to really learn history unless you teach it to yourself, but what I'm slowly and painfully beginning to realize is that hardly anyone cares enough to try.
*blinks at long post*
I don't know how I managed to get all this out of what was supposed to be like a two-sentence review of a movie... I'm just talented like that, I guess.
Anyway, Grave of the Fireflies = excellent movie. Everyone should watch it. Bring Kleenex, turn your brain on, and prepare to learn a little history whether you want to or not.
-Rave