Shame We went to see BlacKkKlansman on the weekend. There were other choices, but this did seem to be the movie of the moment, one not to be missed. It is surely one of the best things Spike Lee has done and a superior movie overall. I sat through nearly every minute of it rigid with shame. Sure, it's 1979, nearly forty years ago, but as Lee's coda shows, we haven't gotten very far from then. I found it impossible not to cringe throughout, especially sprinkled through as it was with nearly tossed-off references to the present day. America has a long history, much longer than the last forty years, the last fifty, sixty years. The country was built on two hundred years of slave labor and another hundred plus of keeping their descendants from accessing the same privileges as the rest of the country, let alone offering any redress. Yes, Civil Rights Act, etc., but making the equal status official does nothing unless it's properly enforced, unless reparations are made, and unless the fundamental attitudes and prejudices are dealt with. I look at the young people I know and have hope. But I look at the young people I don't, when they appear in the news, and despair. How long, O Lord, how long? (But don't think America is alone. Look at Australia's treatment of its indigenous population and the dog-whistling regarding refugees, let alone the internment camps we send those asylum seekers we capture to. Look at the Windrush generation in Britain. Look at the treatment of refugees throughout Eastern Europe. Look at the Rohingya, the Uyghurs . . . . We all have a lot to answer for in how we treat our fellow humans and how we have treated them for so very long.)