"Blood Diamond"

I went to see the movie "Blood Diamond" last night with my friend Andra. And I have to say that it is a movie that EVERYONE should see. It was very violent and disturbing, but spoke the truth about the lives that people in Africa have to live on a daily basis. The movie is about a diamond smuggler (the handsome Leonardo DiCaprio) who meets an African man named Soloman whose family is torn apart by the rebel militia (RUF). This man had found an enormous rare diamond while held captive in a diamond mine. Leonardo figures out about it and convinces Soloman that they can go back to the mine to get it. The movie tells of the two men's struggle to stay alive in the middle of civil war. I won't tell you much more, but the story, although I think it is ficticious with regards to the characters, tells the brutal truth of what people, and children, have to suffer through in Africa. Not just severe poverty, but rape, forced amputations with machetes, villages being burned, child soldiers (who are ripped from their parents, given machine guns, iv drugs, alcohol, brainwashed...) the threat of death at any time. It reminded me of the current brutality in Darfur. These things actually happen. How does the developed world allow this to happen to people? There's a part in the movie where the two men come across this old man in one of the villages they walk through on the way to find the diamond and the old man says something to Soloman along the lines of, "imagine what would happen here if they found oil?!" And it made me laugh. Would it be different? Worse? Another Iraq? The U.S. would sure be over there. Anyways, go see this movie - it will change you, and give you and your friends a lot to talk about.