A Fearsome Beauty: Impossible

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Silkwood

Silkwood is a movie that has stayed with me ever since I saw it in 1983. Meryl Streep portrayed Karen Silkwood, a blue-collar whistle-blower whose groundbreaking efforts to improve worker safety at an American nuclear fuel production plant may have cost her her life. The film also cast Cher in a breakout role that proved she could really act. Silkwood was a good movie, but it has lingered in my mind for all these years because of a single line of dialogue.

Kurt Russell plays Drew, Karen Silkwood's live-in boyfriend and plant co-worker. Though he grudgingly believes in her cause, he's also terrified of the price he fears she may have to pay for her stubborn activism; he wants her to let it go. When she refuses to stop, they quarrel bitterly. He tells her, "Don't give me a problem I can't solve." I understood exactly what he was saying, and I thought of his words today when I read about the live animal key chains being sold in China.

What is wrong with we human beings?

These are the moments when I think it would be easier if my head just exploded. Because there is no place to keep a story like this once I have read it, but I can't forget it, either. I cannot, cannot, imagine being a person who would buy one of these things knowing full well that the living animal sealed within would eventually die. Don't they know what a living thing is?

For now, I guess this journal is where I'll park such a wretched story, if only to keep it out of my head.

About This Journal

I began this journal to think through my experience with a mare I bought in 2004, after years away from riding, and then my start-over with a gelding I acquired in 2009. The one horse shook my confidence as a rider; I hoped to rebuild it with the other. I eventually gave back the horse I thought could help me overcome my anxiety and there before me stood again the horse with whom I choked in the first place.

It sounds like I traveled in a circle, yet not only did I change, but in 2010 I bought another horse, a kind, affectionate Appendix mare who seemed to fall from the sky. "Third time's a charm," they say. It was true for me in love, now let it be true in horses.

I strive to write truthfully about fear, doubt and tension, among other things, difficult subjects to talk about without being self-serving or cheaty. But I tend to dig deep (though it may be little more than scab picking). If you can relate to what I'm talking about, you're welcome to read along and comment whenever you like. Thanks for visiting.