Equlibrium. One of my favorite movies of all time and a movie with a message that changed my life.
The movie centers around a government enforcement agent in the future where everyone is forced to take medication to repress emotion. When the agent stops taking medication he begins to realize all the cruelty that he is inflicting on people. Once he realizes the cruelty that the government represents, he violently destroys it. The message, minus the violence (violence is the problem), is one that I wish every person who enforces government laws would absorb, reflect, and find metaphors for.
I too was a government agent doing cruel things to people. I wasn’t taking medication to repress emotion like in the movie… but I was led to believe that what I was doing was the right thing to do. Hurting someone is never the right thing to do.
In the movie the government enforcement agents kill dogs as a matter of routine. It seems awfully cruel in the Hollywood depiction of a future dystopian society. It seems even crueler in the actual reality of the now.
I couldn’t find the actual scene where dogs are shot at random… but I did find this awesome scene where, once feeling, the agent (Christian Bale) saves a puppy from destruction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcTft47wsDg
I share this with you because of this article (which Radley Balko posted today on his own blog) about the police wrongfully shooting a medical aid dog. This comes not a month after the video went viral about the cruel actions of the police SWAT team in in Columbia, Missouri.
Your heart should tell you that this is wrong…Â even before it happens to you or an animal you love.
