Gangs of New York

Somebody put a notion in my head and the thought has been growing and rolling arund in my brain as most thoughts that tend to stick do. I roll the thought around over and over thinking about seeing it from various angles and applying it to as many situations as I can to test its validity. It has fallen through the cracks and I've found only slight doubts about it. Then I saw the movie Gangs of NewYork today. It pretty much reaffirmed this notion, but I'd like to hold off on talking about it until later.

However I would like to talk about Gangs of New York. I'm not entirely sure if it was based on a true story or not... I hould probably look that up. One sec...

Yup. It's a historical film baed on a non-fiction book written in 1928. The story takes place in 1846 and 1862. A Catholic Irish Priest held a rebellion against "native New Yorkers" who were tormenting the Irish and preventing them from living in peace. The Priest fought "The Butcher" -a meat shop owner who ran the "Native Gang" and was prejudice against Irish. Leonardo DiCaprio plays the Priests son.

The movie has some religious themes to it -how different people interpret religion for their own advancement and sense of validation for their actions and yet act against its teachings. The movie reminded me very much of Far and Away, only far less about romance and far more about the world of violence and turmoil that was going on at the time. It also showed how many people resisted becoming civil and letting go of their pitch forks for the "democratic approach" of using reasoning. It is set with the backdrop of the Civil War and New Yorkers and immigrants rallying against joining the Union.

It's amazing how caught up man can become in his own time and the events of the moment. What seemed to mean everything amounted to thing when shown the passage of time. They focused on revenge and lost their peace and their lives to bloodshed. Movies like they always make your head spin because that lifestyle and ay of living is so far out of the norm of our daily lives and yet it is our shared past. Not the revenge part I mean, but the brutality, the level of poverty, and uneducated masses.