Documentary time

We watched Bowling for Columbine the other night. Very interesting. All I'd ever seen of Michael Moore before this was his little rant at the Oscars which didn't exactly leave me with a positive impression. But I see where his passion comes from, and sometimes passion makes us all do really stupid things.

It isn't hard to see how gun culture + bad social policies = murder and strife. It was interesting to see this at the same time as reading the book noted below as I really saw how peer orientation and attachment problems lead to the extremes we are seeing today, something not noted by Moore.

I thought he was misleading in his portrayal of Canada, however. Twice he said that we had the same kinds of problems with poverty and he used the unemployment rates as proof. Truth is, we do have far less and less sever poverty in Canada than they do in the US. Unemployment is not a measure of poverty and it is inaccurate to portray it as such. He also used Windsor and Sarnia to show how few gun deaths we have. Perhaps Winnipeg and Toronto would be better comparisons to the major urban centres of the US. He tried to paint Canada as a utopia which we are not. So it does make me wonder if he was misleading in other ways.

But overall, a good movie to see, especially for insight in how work to welfare programs can be destructive to families.