Day of decision

“You did this,” he murmured to the man in the mirror. “Every step and misstep brought you to this place. Oh, you had some help and some enablers along the way, but the responsibility is all yours. No one manipulated your fate to put you here; this is the sum total of your every action all tallied together.”

He surveyed the room, thinking, and realized this was so.

“If I had done this before, I would be in a different place now. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now. And so now, where do I plant the first tree?”

He surveyed his life and looked for fertile soil. At first he thought he saw only fertilizer, but then he realized it was the despair talking.

“I can do this,” he said. “All I have to do is decide what ‘this’ is.”

Just as he needed to decide, waves of indecision washed over him and held him in place.

“No, not now,” he insisted and resisted. “Now is not the time to sit and wait. The waiting must end. Time now to act.”

But what? Do what? Act how? The choices were endless, and he had to pick one.

“Of course! I can — no, that would — then this — this is the way — but that might lead me down to —”

The second guesses led to third guesses and on beyond zebra. “Are you really making Dr. Suess references now?” he scoffed, but the thought made him laugh, and he remembered the admonition to “be silly sometimes.”

“What if I were to be silly every day?” he asked himself, but, “No, that’s what got me into this mess in the first place: I overdosed on silliness. Or was I not silly enough? Should I have taken silly to the next level?”

And just like that, he was focused on the past again.

“Stop looking back, this is today,” he repeated like a mantra, until he worked his way back to the present moment. All was fuzzy around him, but that was his aging eyes fooling him. Clarity began to arrive, slowly but decidedly.

“Decidedly,” he sighed. “That word again. I really must decide what to do. Bold action all at once. Oh, no, baby steps, one at a time. What am I going to do?”

He took a next step, and it was the one that made all the difference.

Great anticipations

I am just a little bit older than Godzilla. I was a year and a half old when Gojira was released Nov. 3, 1954. Late this afternoon, I plan to sit down in a comfortable chair and watch the first local showing of the latest film in the series, Godzilla Minus Zero, the sequel to Godzilla Minus One, the first in the 72-year franchise that moved me to tears.

Three years ago I was electrified by the story as I watched it up on the big screen. I walked out of the theater dazed, struck by lightning. It was the most important Godzilla movie since the first one as director Takashi Yamazaki dragged the franchise back to its serious and horrific roots.

The early spoiler-free reviews suggest that the new film may be even better, continuing the big themes that separated Minus One from almost everything that came before.

That 2023 film wasn’t only about a giant monster stomping on buildings, although it did win an Oscar for those special effects. The film was about recovering from war, overcoming shame and devastation, everyday humans rallying against a daunting adversary, building family, building friendships, and of course, “Those of us who survived the war are meant to live.”

Yamazaki leaned into the idea of Godzilla as a metaphor for the nuclear bomb and made a profoundly anti-war film, and that theme above all lifted his movie above the rest of the Godzilla canon, standing beside only the original 1954 entry.

Humanity will advance when it overcomes its monsters and beats its swords into plowshares once and for all. It could be that the monsters will plague us to the end of time with countless sequels, but we do have hope. The ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have kept that monster at bay for 81 years, and may it always be simply a metaphor played out with CGI effects and not actual blood and gore, never unleashed into reality again.

We have a responsibility to live, to overcome the challenges and make a difference. Godzilla Minus One made a difference; I’m hoping that Yamazaki’s lightning has struck a second time.

Back to the basics

It’s late Tuesday night and I turned off the TV after getting a sense of it all. One-party rule has been established in my beloved Wisconsin, and our political trends have tended to spread across the nation over the past 15-20 years, and so … well, you see the illustration I chose for today.

I keep hearing the sage words of the philosopher Tom Petty: “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.” I also keep hearing George Lucas’ wise words as voiced by Natalie Portman in Revenge of the Sith: “This is how liberty dies: To thunderous applause.” On the other hand, I have found over the years that Petty has been right more often than Lucas, and so I will try not to worry.

And that is enough about that.

With a minor revision or two, I am going to draw the rest of today’s post from a piece I wrote in July 2024, another time when I’d had enough of the puppet theater and resolved to make this space a politics-free zone.

What would I write about if I eschew politics and government as a topic?

Well, I have already spent a great deal of time emphasizing a very anti-political thought: “Love your neighbor, and everyone is your neighbor.” That’s certainly still a theme worth exploring.

And while I’m drawing a thought from the New Testament, there are plenty of directions I could go with this: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”

And, of course, “the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”

I think I would like, from this day forward, to make this a safe space, where the theme is first and foremost, “Let’s love, neighbor, and pursue whatever is lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy in a spirit of joy, peace, kindness and all those other fruits.”

I don’t know about you, but I feel healthier already.