Mississippi Burning

I am not exactly sure why I had never seen Mississippi Burning until last night, but I am glad I finally did. If you haven't seen it, you should. Being from the South, I didn't really need a lesson on how terrible things were - and are. But the movie is good and would be even if it were fiction. It's chock full of actors who you know and will recognize and enjoy seeing at a relatively young age.

On top of that, it reminds you of the deleterious effect that hatred has on people and society.

I can never pretend to know what it is like to be black in the south (or the north) today, much less back then. But I can imagine what it is like to be a white racist and have that kid of hatred in your soul. What a pitiful existence that must be - to devote energy to negative and exclusionary goals and feelings. I don't think you could ever truly love when your heart is broken with that much anger and insecurity.

The most powerful scene for me was when Gene Hackman's character recounts a story from his childhood when the black sharecropper down the road got a mule.