Why I Love Avatar

I used to hate politics, thought it was the most boring thing in the world. In my early twenties I was in the army and air force reserves. It taught me that politics matter. I became a fanatical war history buff and majored in political science and economics, with minors in history and international studies. In my mind I had a very powerful question: is war ever necessary? Well, the answers I came up with turned me into a peace activist.

Ironically most people in the military (and US citizens) have never actually read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States of America. The Declaration of Independence is a stunning call to revolution and insists on the right of people to overthrow their government (including our own). It is an unbelievably subversive document. We celebrate it every year, but how many people have ever actually read it?

Not only that, but very few people bothered to do any research into reasons that Bush and his crowd might want to attack Afghanistan or Iraq other than their public rhetoric. I heard people making moronic statements like “Iraq bombed us on 9/11 so we have to fight back.”

Fucking assholes can’t get their facts straight and know absolutely nothing about the history… about how the US government supported a vicious, greedy dictator in Iran and after the Iranian revolution, funded Hussein for years during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. So many people died in that war, they were left to putting guns in the hands of little boys and sending them off to their deaths.

That war might never have happened if it hadn’t been for US funding and certainly would not have lasted as long. Then after a year of Iraq demanding that Kuwait stop taking oil from under Iraqi soil and threatening to attack them if they didn’t stop, the US ambassador was told to make the statement to Hussein that the US would not take a stand either way in an Iraq-Kuwait dispute. They intentionally set him up to invade Kuwait. It was all about getting a military base close to the world’s largest oil reserves.

And when the US invaded Iraq in 2003, people were putting little plastic (petroleum) flags on their cars as if to say, “Fuck you, you’re not human and it’s our oil anyway.”

I used to get chills all over my body and tears in my eyes when I stood for the National Anthem. But when, as a political science major, I started to learn the truth about what some people in the US government have done around the world in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, etc. I was devastated. It was like how I would feel if I found out my father were a child molester.

I’m a strong believer in living like a warrior and it’s not about blindly killing or sacrificing one’s life. It’s all about energy. In martial arts, they teach how to use energy and never to use force when it can be avoided. A warrior, like a mage, must learn to respect the Mysteries.

I loved Avatar because I’ve never seen a film that depicted these ideas so well. The Na’vi just wanted to live in harmony with their planet and each other. But the humans blindly demolished everything in their way because the Corporation told them to do so.

Fortunately there were a few who stood up for what was right and those were the true warriors. I especially liked the blue girl and the female pilot.

In my latest novels, I’ve created female characters who are called to serve the warrior-goddess Artemis. I’m not interested in trash about “man-eaters” and “shopaholics”. In my opinion, books like that are degrading to women.

Don’t get me wrong, the goddess is sensual and feminine as well. Men are not the enemy in my novels, nor in my life. The antagonist in my novels is a certain way of thinking — and it’s personified in some of the characters — a way of thinking that is overly rational, materialistic, narrow-minded, destructive, blind, unconscious, ignorant, intolerant, greedy, ego-centric, etc.