We live in a time when the current US administration is erasing the climate crisis from public discourse, removing all laws and policies and practices that would protect human life by reversing global warming, and subjugating the most vulnerable of our citizens to multiplying climate disasters. We stand by helplessly as these moves give full throttle to our looming cosmic train wreck.
Two movies show responses to disasters brought about by human actions.
Apocalypse Now presents Col. Kurtz in Vietnam as a man who has become a renegade, dictatorial leader of a brutal jungle military group – this because he witnessed his Cambodian enemies chop the arms off children who had been vaccinated by European medical programs. Kurtz chose to fight the horrors of evil with more evil.
A second movie, Of Gods and Men, shows a Cistercian monastic community in Algeria that exists in conditions of escalating danger as they minister to the Algerian village people around them. In spite of everything, they choose to stay and follow through with their calling. The terrorists take them, leading them away to be executed. They chose to continue to serve, to serve to the end, in a declining situation.
In these films the alternatives in the face of big trouble are stark and clear. We can take up the weapons of the enemy and fight evil with evil – or we can move forward in being true to what is right, no matter the outcome. — Don Johnson, 28 August 2025
