Jaws, a Statue, and Major World Events

            Currently I am living in China, teaching English to little kids. Despite all of the craziness of the world situation, I have been loving my new job, finding it both adventurous and rewarding. I’ve been trying to keep up with the news in America and the world at large, reading and watching videos on both the virus and the protests back in my home country.

            With the tragic and horrifying murder of George Flloyd (I did force myself to watch the video of him being held down by the cop, and yes, I’m going to use the term murder), I decided to take some time off from writing and publishing my blog. I had a few ideas for blog articles, mostly on light topics. I’ll probably write them in the near future, but they seemed shallow in comparison to the news about ongoing police brutality (and quite frankly murder) and people trying to change things. Kind of figured that writing about my thoughts on buffets might be inappropriate when I had friends on Facebook writing about their experiences with racism and other injustices. Figured that maybe I should simply read and listen instead for a bit.

            Lately though I have had a few thoughts on both the virus and the protests.

            There’s been a ton of stuff on the reopening of businesses and the public at large. I’ve also seen tons of footage of people (mostly white people, let’s be honest) protesting not for any actual justice, but for businesses such as hair salons to open back up. The other day I was thinking about it, and it honestly reminded me of the movie “Jaws.”

            Now, you may be thinking, “How? How does a virus and businesses being closed remind you of a shark movie?”

            In the opening of the movie we see a young woman running down the beach, gleefully whipping off her clothes and diving into the ocean. The shark then savagely eats this poor girl who just wanted to have fun and enjoy an early morning skinny dip. The police chief Martin Brody, upon discovering this, wants to close down the beach. However, the Major doesn’t want this to happen because that would just hurt the local economy with tourism season coming. As a result, Jaws comes to the beach and eats a little boy in front of a crowd of beachgoers.

            Now, even with the death of now two people, everyone in a local town hall meeting is reluctant to close the beach. Pretty much everyone in attendance is either a business owner (like one of the local hotels) or is otherwise dependent upon the tourism economy. A tiger shark is killed, and everyone aside from Martin Brody and Matt Hooper (an oceanographer played by Richard Dreyfus) just wants to assume that that is the end of Jaws. It takes a third person to get killed on the Fourth of July weekend for everyone to finally take the situation seriously, close down the beach, and to go after the real shark.

            Honestly I feel like “Jaws” is a good metaphor for the virus situation and for everyone to want local businesses to simply open up again. Like the citizens of the small beach town, everyone wants to think that the virus is either an overblown issue or perhaps even a hoax. And it seems to take multiple people dying (mostly right in front of their very eyes) for them to finally take the issue seriously. I get it; this is a situation that sucks. Like I said earlier, I’m currently living in China, and for a while we had to have a bunch of stores and businesses closed. Several of them are still closed For several weeks the only place really open was the local grocery store. For a brief time when I entered (always wearing a mask of course), the cashiers were dressed head to toe in scrubs, looking like the scientists entering Elliot’s home in “E.T.” (another great Spielberg film). I was just reading about the situation in Florida (where I used to live) and the coronavirus is apparently rising since more things have been reopened.

            As I mentioned earlier I have also been keeping up with the protests in response to the murder of George Flloyd. Personally I am for the protests as long as they are peaceful. I’m against looting. I’m not saying that looting is a worse crime or sin than killing someone, or that losing some merchandise or a store is worse than losing a life, but I’m still against looting (for better or worse, there’s no way that the police here in China would have put up with looting, no matter the cause). Personally I’m more concerned about the safety of employees (oftentimes underpaid) in a store than the store itself; I actually have a younger sister who works at Nordstrom’s in Bellevue, Washington, and I was and have been worried about her safety.

            The protests of the murder of George Flloyd have basically sparked a worldwide movement. There have even been a mural of George Flloyd painted in Syria. And one thing that happened in the United Kingdom got me thinking, and I found the action to have poetic irony. Not sure if the people in the U.K. meant for it to have poetic irony, but it seemed to do so.

            Edward Colston was a British man who made his fortune in the slave trade. He apparently gave a bunch of his money to charity, which is at least partially why there was a giant statue of him in Bristol. Whatever you may think of the Confederate statues in the States, in my opinion a statue of this man is far worse. Lately there have been many petitions to remove the more than century-old statue. With the murder of George Flloyd, some people decided to take matters into their own hands and topple the statue, throwing it into a river.

            Now what do I find ironic about it? If you’re at all familiar with the horrific history of the slave trade, you may know that not all of the poor kidnapped Africans survived the voyage from their homeland to an alien country. Oftentimes the newly enslaved would get sick while being crammed and chained together for weeks on end in a ship. Slave traders might fear that the sick would make others ill, killing even more slaves. So when slaves were deemed too ill to survive the voyage, they were often chained together and then thrown overboard into the depth of the ocean to die. Also, many of the kidnapped decided that they would rather die than spend the rest of their lives as miserable slaves in a foreign land, and would jump overboard and drown themselves (or find another way to commit suicide) if given the chance.

            Again, Spielberg portrayed this horrific practice in his movie “Amistad.”

            It’s kind of ironic that Edward Colston, a man who made his fortune and his mark on the world by engaging in the slave trade, had his statue thrown into a body of water. I’m not sure if that’s what the statue stealers were thinking, but I kind of find it ironic.

            Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on major world events. Not my most light blog article by any means. Now, after working on my new blog article, I’m going to prepare for my upcoming classes. I’m going to try to make this oftentimes crazy and chaotic (but still beautiful) world a little better by teaching English to little kids.

Note: If you want, you can check out my fantasy novel "The Princess of Infinite Tomorrows," online and currently for free at https://princessofinfinitetomorrows.blogspot.com/.