Everyone Is Wounded

I was talking with my friend, Gil, about the film The Fisher King, and as he talked about it, I thought about my family, and how when I am at some holiday festive table with them, I look around and wonder where I had met this group of cutthroats.
We yearn for the perfect families depicted in the media, until we realize they do not exist.
We are all wounded, like the Fisher King; somewhere, somehow we all carry the scars of our battles.

And that is what Celebrity is: the icon of the Perfect Woman (Gwyneth Paltrow), or Man (Matt Damon), or Family (The Waltons). Even though we know it is impossible, we seek out this model of perfection... as if Celebrity and Perfection were some category of Human Understanding, deeply set within the psyche of mankind, and triggered during the developmental stage of our childhood.

I found it interesting. I think of the future often: is it a Celebrity future, or a Our Dysfuncional Family future?
The future as portrayed in film such as Star Wars is a future that reminds me greatly of our present day approach to Afghanistan: we have been there for over 10 years, and in our quest to secure hearts and minds, we seem to have overlooked the importance to Afghanis of their religion, and threw a couple of Qurans into a fire.

Our idea of war is Celebrity War, but the reality is getting our behinds kicked 10 years after we had driven the Taliban entirely out of the country. Reality is that after 10 years, a lot of people really do not like us very much, and what kind of a war was that, anyhow?

We can not even deal with our wounded: those who are wounded in the soul. We can not imagine that war is not a good and righteous undertaking that ennobles us; it does not drive us insane, it does not create momentary monsters of us and our neighbors, does it? Not our wars.
But it is not Star Wars; it is a film where the heroes are as wounded as are the villains.

And we are all wounded.
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