THINGS I LEARNED THIS WEEKEND . . .

1. Women are bitches. It doesn't matter if she is Christian or not. It doesn't matter if she's your sister or not. It doesn't matter that one day she professes to love you and to consider you family. It doesn't matter that she's black, white, Asian, Hispanic, something else, a mix of all or some of the above. It doesn't matter that she's young or old or really really old. It doesn't matter that she's successful or downtrodden. It doesn't matter that she's single or married or somewhere in between or formerly one or the other. It doesn't matter that she's pretty or ugly or somewhere in the middle. It doesn't matter that she's poor or wealthy or ridiculously one or the other. It doesn't matter that she seems to have it all or that she apparently has nothing. None of that, and none of anything else, matters.

Women are always going to be competitive with each other: for men, for jobs, for popularity, for attention, for money, for the love of another, for friends, for time, for the tangible and intangible, to feel better about themselves, to make the other woman feel bad, to make up for an insecurity, to foster an insecurity in the other woman, to exact revenge, to exact personal satisfaction, to make a point, to win or at least not to lose or at least not feel like they lost something.

I suppose I shouldn't feel disappointed when I encounter a woman -- friend or stranger or complete foe -- who competes with me for any of the above things. But I am, for two reasons. First, it just sucks and it makes me feel bad, and then it makes me angry, and when I get angry, the root cause festers inside me and makes me sick and tense and agita-ed to the max. And that turns ME into a bitch. And I hate being a bitch because then I take out by bitchiness not on the woman who turned me into a bitch in the first place, but on the innocent bystander. And then I feel worse. Second, it makes me realize I am the exact same way, and it seems hopeless to try to change myself or to change the attitudes of women around me, my friends, my family, my coworkers.

Women in this country struggle with self-image, self-confidence, being paid 75% less than men for the SAME EXACT JOB. We struggle with being married, being single, being ugly, being too pretty, being overweight, suffering from an eating disorder. We struggle with loneliness, abuse, low self-esteem, emotional distance, illness, and so much more. And though we like to talk about building each other up, and certainly in the Christian context, being each other's "sisters," we aren't. We seemingly can't. That just sucks. I refuse to believe and accept that we suck, that we women suck ... but don't we, kind of?

2. When one is deprived of hope, one turns into an animal and resorts to desperate, unthinkable measures. I just got back from watching "Silmido," a Korean film running on limited released in NYC this week. This film is entirely in Korean, with no subtitles -- I hope that changes because it's really a film worth seeing, even if you have zero ties to Korea or Korean people. The enthralling thing about the movie is ... it's based on true fact, history, that was hidden away and forgotten (or maybe not) for the last forty years. Finally, someone(s) discovered the truth, wrote a book and turned it into this movie, telling an incredible tale ...

In the 1960s, 31 North Korean soldiers? mercenaries? murderers? political pawns? were sent into South Korea to assasinate then-President Park Chung-hee. They almost succeeded and got scarily close to the Blue House (the Presidential seat) before being caught and killed by the South Korean military. In revenge (though no one will admit this, I'm sure), in 1968, the South Korean government started training 31 hardened prisoners -- men on death row or sentenced to life imprisonment -- on the island of Silmi-do, off the coast of South Korea. They endured over two years of the harshest military training -- reports say that the movie, while mostly accurate, could not wholly depict the exact training procedures because the actors would not be able to endure filming and the audiences would not be able to endure viewing -- for the sole purpose of being sent into North Korea to assasinate then-dictator Kim Il-Sung. With the mission accomplished, they would be given new lives, their sentences commuted.

These 31 hardscrabble convicts became a troop, a team, a brotherhood, and as one united body, they departed for North Korea one stormy night (no kidding), seeking not only to destroy Kim Il-Sung, but to start their lives over once they returned to the South successful, as heroes. Mere minutes after their departure, their military leaders pushed out to sea after them to turn them back: the word had come from on high that the government's policy towards North Korea had changed. Instead of elimination and invasion, the South was going to try a peaceful policy. The assasination attempt was moot.

The rest of the film portrays the downward spiral of the 31 men and the troops guarding? befriending? training? with them. With nothing to live for anymore, the men became desperate, and like starving dogs, they turned on each other, going slowly but surely crazy. After discovering that their own government wanted them executed -- these 31 unknown, lost, nameless convicts trained to murder and kill -- the men turn on the military in a last-ditch effort to avoid certain death. They determine to get back to mainland Korea and tell their story, so that they will not be lost in anonymity, a blank chapter in the country's history.

The end is predictable and now widely known. They die, all together, blowing themselves up in a bus as they try to get to President Park to tell him the whole truth, but prevented from doing so by the very military that trained them. They are branded Communist infiltrators by their own goverment. The Silmi-do project is forgotten, its official report shelved and locked away in a government filing cabinet for forty years. Until some dude discovers it ...

Apparently, in real life, they did not all die. One of the military trainers lived ... a handful of the convicts who made it to the mainland lived ... and this was their story. It's so crazy, it's like a movie or something ...

Anyway, my point was ... films like this make me think about humanity and inhumanity, and how very fine the line is that separates the two. People can be born a certain way, then trained, then changed, then broken, then remade, then given hope, then lifted up, then made human again, then deprived of hope, then made into animals. How different the course of the universe would be had we no capacity for rage, revenge, fury, desperation, hope, dashed hope, deception ...

3. My cousin Jake is far wiser than I had initially thought. He is going around telling his second-grade classmates not to vote for the Shrubbery in November. Hee, hee!

(OK, OK, never mind that second-graders can't vote, so Jake's campaign is moot. You have to give the kid two snaps in a circle for being more aware of current events than most adults I know!)