Gollum's MTV Awards Acceptance Speech

For the_maenad and anyone else who's baffled, Gollum's MTV Awards Acceptance Speech (which won the Hugo in the Best Buffy Episode Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form category), can be seen as a Quicktime movie here.

Beslan

I can't help but react when hearing about violence people do (though of course with varying degrees of disapproval, from "huh" to "OMG"), so I wonder about by own wish to explore all the angles of this particular tragedy. It seems almost voyeuristic because it is far away in an uheard-of town, and because of the uncompromising cruelty of the hostage takers' actions and their belief that the Russian authorities would not dare stoop as low as themselves; I therefore find it to be another depressingly low point in recent history. So up against all the righteous '20/20 hindsight' commentary on the misguided tactic of fighting fire with fire I wish everyone could undercut all that bullshit and go back to the kind of principle once expressed by Joan Baez: "The point of non-violence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink. A platform which stands a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand."

But what happened in Beslan need not be just another atrocity that keeps "us" as far away as ever from that 'decent place to stand'. It would probably be easier for me to just point the finger at "them" and the evil "they" do without looking at my own personal relationship with violence, a relationship we all have if we care to look at it, define it and examine it. I try to keep it out of my life in as many of its forms as I can as much as possible, though like most people there's always room for improvement. Something that helps me meditate on this is Bruce Cockburn's 'You Get Bigger As You Go', so excuse me while I go listen to it now. ( ... )