Ten Years Later...

This past weekend, I watched Bowling for Columbine. Not a new documentary at all, but one that I had been wanting to see and I was looking to unwind. I definitely did not expect the film to strike me as much as it did. Despite being released in 2002, ten years later there are still so many of the same issues that Michael Moore brought up then.

For those who haven't seen it, it centers around the mass school shooting that happened at Columbine High School but I found it was really more about gun control and violence. It talks about how the number of killings by gunshoot in the U.S. more than triples the number of that in Canada, France, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Moore attempts to understand what makes Americans so quick to pull the trigger and while he never comes through with a straight answer, it does seem to come down to fear. Thinking about the recent Zimmerman case in Florida, I found this is to be particularly interesting. Why are we so afraid?

Moore also touches on the welfare system, which still continues to have its problems today. I think Jordan had made an earlier comment about the welfare system and how it doesn't really benefit people at all. There was a scene which illustrated this particularly well in the movie where a woman, through a work to welfare program, worked 70 hours a week in two entry-level, low paying jobs that barely paid her rent.

The movie also highlights how society and media continually make the black man as the bad guy and our conversations about the prison system and race really made those scenes more poignant.

It's sad that so many of these issues are still issues today and we aren't really all that much closer to finding a resolution. Doesn't it seem like they are getting worse? I definitely expected the film to be meaningful but my experiences in this class allowed me to watch it in through a specific lens that allowed me to see these stories in a deeper, more relevant way.