"The Fast And The Furious" as mid-east parable No truer middle-eastern fable was told. Watching it with Sweety last night I could feel the slight bends in reality occurring. The basic premise is a group of car drivers are hijacking trucks full of stuff and a young undercover officer has infiltrated the street-racing community to find out who is doing it. They do this a few times, the young cop makes no progress with anything other than a young lady, and we are warned the truckers will take things into their own hands. Finally, three quarters of the way through the movie, another attack happens and, sure enough, this trucker is armed. We feel the tension as he shoots at them ... one of them has managed to get himself snared on the truck while trying to enter it after pulling out the truck's windshield. The hero of the movie has to save the racer stranded on the truck. Watching this movie it is clear that the hijackers are still the heroes and the villain is the trucker. Imagine being a trucker, having yourself surrounded by young people with crossbows who shoot out your windshield and invade your truck. Here's the funny part: Earlier truckers were armed only with baseball bats and such and were overwhelmed ... which clearly did no good ... they were still hijacked, their lives at risk, and they were assaulted. Yet the movie wants us to believe that the trucker is the bad guy. In the end, the moral equivalence is so thick it is startling. The hero lets the obvious villain get away ... throwing out his integrity, his hard work, hundreds of thousands of tax dollars, and basically everything he stands for. Why? Well, for the sequel of course, but more because of friendship. We wonder why people have a skewed sense of right and wrong. It's no different in the mid-east. People are judging based on emotion rather than facts and while we all can sympathize with the plight of people displaced from their homes and with dead family members, we can't toss out the facts. Siding with people who only use violence to get what they want is our moral struggle. We shouldn't let Israel be overwhelmed in the interests of our peace of mind. It is their war. We certainly should not let the EU with its total reliance on Arab oil, make these decisions. By the way, the trucker who defended himself with the shotgun is the only one who escaped hijacking, and he single-handedly stopped the crime ring our young police friend couldn't ... and the trucker didn't have any moral equivalence at all about defending himself from aggression. Maybe we should send the Teamsters to Israel.