I watched the 94th Academy Awards last night,  a bit reluctantly.  The Academy Awards show, as such shows go, become absurd in the bid to out-do themselves.  Each year the aspiration is for more of a spectacle than anything done in the past.  The need to produce “a show” to attract advertisers competes with the ostensible purpose of honoring excellence in story telling at the cinema. 

Keeping company with my wife on the sofa, I forgot my discomfort with the edgy jokes, which I naturally struggle to understand.  I am not current with what’s-going-on with movies and movie stars.  Jokes are sophisticated.  One must share the form-of-life that a community embodies to “get” a witticism, a play upon words that references what insiders instantly know.  I watched and felt resonance with the effort to include communities which have been excluded from the focus by the dominant, white Caucasian male culture.  CODA, a film about a deaf family won best picture.  Dune a story by the great writer Frank Herbert won many awards.  Dune is a sci-fi story about a family facing great odds on a hostile planet, surviving by virtue of sacrifice.  Dune is one of the stories that changed my life.  I have seen the film by Denis Villeneuve, and I hope to view it once again.

Communities that are by and large excluded from power sharing by the dominant community, survive and thrive by virtue of sacrifice.  Do not all healthy families thrive, by sacrificing for one another?  Is that not how the child achieves a sense of self, by the patient protracted sacrifice of it’s parents?  This is true of the LBGTQ community who looks out for one another, true of the Black and Latinx communities…

Sub communities deprived of the benefits of power have “come a long way” in my lifetime in this country.  Perhaps this is true globally, world-wide.  When one does not consider the big picture, “how far we’ve come” is easy to lose sight of. 

Consider these words from Homer’s Iliad written in the late 8th to early 7th century BCE.  The magnificent poem of war was written down after being transmitted verbally generation to generation.  King Agamemnon is speaking to his assembled Greek Army in the aftermath of a near mutiny.  After all they have been at war on the plain of Troy for nine years without success.  The speech by the Greek king is a stark depiction of the status of women in particular, in a context of war.

Never forget that we are born to kill.
We keep the bloodshed to the maximum…

…For soon, with God our Father’s help,
Each one of you will have a Trojan she
To rape and rule, to sell or to exchange,
And Greece will be revenged for Helen’s wrong.’

—War Music An Account of Homer’s Iliad
by Christopher Logue

In Homer’s time and until recently if you consider the arc of civilization, slavery was considered “normal” and women were property.  That is the brutal truth of the matter.  The behavior in war as described by Homer is today considered a war crime. 

In the relative quiet of this morning’s Starbucks room women work alongside men as baristas for equal pay.  That is as it should be.

The long march to become human continues.