I've been watching Fiddler on the Roof for about the fifth or sixth time… [View all]

[WCGreen]

It’s a wonderful, terrifying movie about the world in flux, the world about to explode, tradition against modernity, heartache and sorrow and the possibility of tomorrow.

And the music is top notch as well.

As I watch this movie I hear my father’s voice in the background, not the father who I knew for a few short years, but the father that was drinking his way into hate and prejudice, telling me the Jews own everything, the control Hollywood.

His family is from that part of the world, the part of Central Europe where the boundaries of Ukraine and Poland flowed back and forth for centuries, where the Jewish folks were always treated as second or third class people.

Whenever he would get in those dark moods I would say that yes Dad, the Jewish people are in the entertainment business, but when they started in, show business was looked down upon and no respectable person would want to choose that as a way to make a living.

I have no proof of this; I just concocted the argument to shut him up.

He was also the same man that wouldn’t let us watch the 60’s sit com called Julia which featured African American actress Dyane Carroll as a widowed nurse with a small boy. It was a gentle nudge designed to start featuring minorities on the networks.

Anyway, I digress.

FOTR is such an interesting look at fast things can change, how outside pressures inserts it selves in even the most isolated communities.

That part of the movie where Tevye is warned by the local Russian Apparatchik that a Pogrom is coming. When it comes on the night of the Tevye’s daughter’s wedding; my heart breaks. When the Apparatchik shows up to stop the violence inside the wedding, he is so sad and says what all people who follow; it was my orders…

I think about all the barriers we construct to define ourselves only to find that we exclude far more than we include.

But now and then, a moment comes along and pulls us together.

What I take from the movie is to treasurer those moments that you have as best you can and to try to find how to accept all those things that happens to us that we cannot control.

Maybe we are in one of those times that we have to pull together. We have to look at ourselves and say is this really what we want for our future?

I know people always say that elections are important, some more than others. But this election is one of those life changing moments for our country.

Make no mistake about it, if Rick Santorum get’s himself elected, we will see more turmoil and I fear violence as one part of the country looks toward their traditions for protection and the other looks ahead to the future.

As Tevye turns to meet his future, there is an optimistic lilt in the air. He had someplace to go, he was heading off to the New World in New York.

The best place we have to go is the Voting Booth to make sure the people so intent on resurrecting the fifth century are defeated.