DAY SIX: Bright Eyes and Bloody Waters

Docu-Day Part Two started at the Writer's Guild of America at 9am. F. drives me over the hill. weather spectacular, feel like I live in a national park. Clouds big, blustery, moody, supposed to rain today. Weird goin into a crowd, especially docu-hounds who tend to keep to themselves, or to huddle in smart-hipster packs. They who prefer the succinct and the smart. They who buy dollar coffees and Cheetos and half sandwiches and sit in darkness for 15 hours.
Who would do that, you ask? Especially when the news out there is not so good. Dolphins and whales are being slaughtered and enslaved. Chickens and cows and pigs live and die, crowded together, standing in their own feces. There are only five meat processing/packing plants in the whole United States, and only five major food corporations. There's too much corn in all of our food. 1 in 2 children born after 2000 risks developing childhood diabetes. Obesity is a prevalent disease. Unions are being undermined. Industrial America is closing shop and shutting down for good, leaving blue collar workers at age 45 and beyond unable to find jobs that pay enough for them to support a family, afford health care, have a nice vacation every year.
Children as young as 9 years old from Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico are leaving home to ride Mexican freight trains to cross deserts into the U.S. Those who do not make it die from dehydration, alone, bodies sent back to their parents, unrecognizable, buried without visual identification, DNA evidence sufficing.
Children in schools in the Szechuan province of China died in large numbers due to the shoddy construction of the schools where they sat, learning, when the earthquake came. Parents seek justice, but are censored by their government, compensated $8000 a child lost, to keep their mouths shut.
Dissidents in Burma are beaten, jailed, imprisoned, when they stand up to the repressive regime that rules their country. They must smuggle their videos out of the country. Monks who stand with the people are beaten, yet they return, in support of those who suffer with no freedom.
It's a brutal sad hard world. In the cosy confines of the dignified WGA, I sit, with strangers who cry as I do, ask good questions, while I sit in silence.
These are the good times. My heroes are those documentary makers. I will keep showing up, watching, learning, glad they are out there taking the risks.
This blog is simply to honour them.
And to say I want to simplify my life.
This must relate to yoga somehow.
But that discussion belongs to another episode.
On to the Oscars.