A Reflection on Amistad

You know how some things make you sad and others things are so far past sad they just devastate you?  Well, that’s kind of how I felt watching that part of Spielberg’s Amistad, most acutely when those evil men were feeding disgusting slop to the people they had brutally kidnapped.

Usually I feel at least slightly sympathetic or, if I’m feeling particularly ungenerous, apathetic when people get killed in movies.  But if I’m being totally honest, when the Mende tribesmen killed the crew of the La Amistad, it was really satisfying.  I can hardly think of anyone more deserving of such gruesome and painful deaths, though really, the crewmen deserved much worse.  It sort of reminds me of the catharsis in tragedies, though really I wasn’t even close to being at peace until I remembered those evil crewmen would rot in Hell for the rest of eternity.

Nowadays, you’ll hear so many people say, “Well, that’s just the way it was back then.”  No…slavery really is not “just the way it was back then.”  There’s literally no excuse at all for kidnapping people, enslaving them, and torturing them in order to make them perform free labor.  Normal children don’t torture their classmates or even animals, which in my opinion proves that slavery isn’t “the way it was.”  Nobody made the United States sanction the slave trade or domestic slavery.  I mean, how many of us have been exposed to sex trafficking; yet how many of us can agree that it’s absolutely wrong, no gray about it, and is entirely unforgivable?  So, Roy Moore, when you said the U.S. was great back in the time of slavery just because of family values, you were WRONG.  No time in our history during the years of slavery was great.  I just can’t comprehend what an idiot you must be to argue otherwise.