In LA when I was school teaching in South Central 20 years ago after a very bad week, my then boyfriend and I would hop over to see films where Westwood blended with Beverly Hills.It was a very extreme time in my living... This film was one I so enjoyed. It is a quirky love of life story about a woman (Glenda Jackson who is a marvelous actress) with a terrible haircut, her joyous affection for turtles and a friendship formed with a used bookshop owner, a fellow lover of turtles and literature, and centers on a plot they develop to save some turtles. It is small and intimate and I believe a film my brother in law calls "a nothing really happened" piece. Recently thought of it clearly again sitting at a long horrible funeral for a friend who was a gentle lady, with a bad haircut, and a deep abiding love and kinship with turtles and a special bond with my husband. I realized this film had foreshadowed a bit of my ordinary "nothing happened" existence to me 20 years ago. In life we form friendships and find compassion and connection with people in seemingly random and precious moments. My turtle friend, who worked for my husband for a time, as a secretary in his school-then my school, took care of him , my kids, myself and was very private-revealed something of herself in this love of the turtles she had around her from time to time one of the few things you really knew about her. Real turtles and those collectible. She treated them like cats actually(in the film you are seeing giant sea turtles) , these pet turtles responded back as bonded as you can imagine. It was a very unique thing to see a person so vibrantly connected to turtles. I felt that in the film , in the love these individuals had for the species...it seemed to relate to the privacy, shyness, fragility of feeling and yet strength of character, the primitive dignity of my friend, she easily could have been placed into the movies' internal spaces. For me now there she lives freed of earthly connection. So I watched it again this evening after 20 years and grieved deeply losing someone who was very shy and private and who suffered a terrible end of life to cancer spread through her system. To me I see the touching beauty of the friendship between the characters in the movie as so valuable and so meaningful on a personal level-I'm aging with such an awareness of how gentle simpatico with another , how the shared love of turtle, of literature , of something understood really about life , brings a kind of lightening of heart. For my friend her shared relating to my husband was so meaningful/personal to her in ways I could not entirely understand.. and her to him.This was movie core message. It was a lesson to me. I recommend this film to those who value friendship. You know I was also thinking of a film with Anne Bancroft(in New York) and her friend in London in the bookshop-anyway a very similar piece. Maybe it is a phenomonological relationship(whatever that is no?)....but for me a tender film and now I'll always think of Terri Truxler and my love for her, turtles and dear warm moments I hold in my heart with friends of the spirit.

Confucianism and Human Rights by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming (Paperback - April 15, 1999)

In junior high I had a stellar moment, proving of course the depth of my intellectual capacity and peeking into my scholarly breadth o' knowledge, when I asked Mrs. Hall (the English teacher who led us through Lord of the Flies, Holden's Catcher alienation and angst, Papillion and Miracle Working while we gleefully set her clock ahead ten minutes daily and staged unbelievable antics with and with out fire throwing a desk out the window one morning)..I asked if the root of "confusion or rather confuse was Confucius"(in utter Appalachian sincerity). I recall my male classmates regaling me with that one for the next 6 years. Well Latin and Greek roots were clearly never my thing, I answered back, and that brought even more hilarity for them. Just get over it Kevin Moore, (my math state scores in 6th grade still kick your behind). All this aside I found that my appalling stupidity propelled/propels me into reading "everything Asian" and I have really got a bookcase of great things on Eastern worlds I'm too poor to visit that I'm slowly re-reading/reading/skimming/ ok at times just looking at the pictures. One of those books without pictures is this work. I highly recommend it. I found it in Santa Monica on a jaunt down to tool around with my little girls when I got away from them for a second in a bookstore.
The book is a collection of quite "scholarly essays", serious and maybe even dry, very martini dry, essays, on the notion of "human rights" from the perspectives of Asian writers and "experts" in their field ("18 leading Western and Chinese authorities on Confucian tradition, modern China and modern human rights issues") and what does this mean to the west today? .. The essays certainly are something my husband really responds to, footnoted, researched, thorough, remarkably slow to read and quite a challenge. Thus if the root of Confucianism is confuse...I'm in a very good place here with my early life perception. If you are thinking this is a light park read, think more about your relationship to the park... it requires me to take notes, pay attention, consider ideas from many angles, go check history, in short step up. Actually I recall some of the articles better than others and formed understandings in my colloquial realm but here goes an attempt to discuss the book. I find it very interesting that cultures and countries, times (as in periods) and governmental forms as well as language development within these constructs allow us on our planet to have different relationships with ideas/concepts we might think are "universal”. Somewhat like Clinton's definition of "is"...That's really the point of the book. Period. So I say "mom" and though we talk of universal understanding, is this construct really universally the same? (Meet the mother in law-not entirely certain of my definitions any longer). This sits at the center of the book around western and eastern societies relationship to individual and human rights. The construct of "human right"-law, due process, treatment of prisoners, state rights, responsibilities of citizens certainly are constructed in my understanding even in my own cultural context differently than another’s living down the block with that damn "Bush Saves" sign up, much less in another world away. I found that out early on in a 15 year old jaunt to the Bahamas where I found out a bit about classism and right to work. Television and modern popular culture keeps me informed on the national "truths" or political definitions...or pushes what is to be accepted truth today really effectively. As in Yada Yada...and All schools are Failing...and Coke is Real..or winning the war...well what it does is take language and assign a particular view or meaning to a term like "mom" which can be shaded quite a bit in this context and often then carry a lie embedded into the term much like No Child Left Behind carries-wonderful words meaning removing liberal ideology/removing freedom of instructional design from teachers/widening achievement gaps while announcing they are closed.... but let us say less fanatically that if you control the meaning of a word or frame the argument you proceed within only your own context. This is problematic for this nation globally in "human rights" constructs. Not meaning we aren't supposed to be here working for bettering life on earth obviously this is the mandate we assumed in our national charter-it's just necessary to do a great deal of work on how others understand us and we them and why. ... I suppose that was what Indira Gandhi was talking about when she foresaw TV and media as the possible device to unite her diverse country into something like a nation without fragmentation and infighting amongst its remarkably diverse groups. She just didn't live because it wasn't realized... So we have a national and personal notion of a world view of human rights and as it happens the world has its own notions...and some of this tears away at unity and stability ...and this I think is what is getting us currently into repeated issues of political and foreign policy debacles. We don't learn others constructs, just sitting here in armchair America, and we have a heck of a hard time seeing from another’s' perspective but we do like to prescribe and we would like to influence the world... Ok back to the book...One essay talks of the fact the term human rights as bandied about in popular culture here and now in America carries no corresponding language character in Chinese. You always take note of what you can't say in another world. Of course this kind of attempt to embed a reader in another cultural perspective and then to find ways to enhance understanding-very interesting yet almost like trying to relate what you heard at the doctors office, what they said, what you felt/said, what the doctor might have meant when we all fully well know you lack the training the doc has and can't articulate much of it and they might just actually really be wrong, or right, or not exactly understanding what you are there for. In short there is a great deal to miss in this book and a great deal of understanding of basic Confucianism presented and how it might better inform current Chinese political dialogs (and is being used to do so post Mao) as well as how cultural context already did form base Chinese understanding. And as I read today there are ideals in Confucius such as who is entitled to school or leadership or access to ideas that are in and of themselves very different than a democratic society might esteem. As you examine Jeffersonian notions of education and society you actually learn America's relationship to public and everyman education and elitism is one that is fairly complex. And the text crawls through this underbrush very functionally for a reader who lacks the basic knowledge of China's history. So I read thinking about the "individual", about national leadership, about how unlikely it is that in negotiating with Asian worlds young people who go to live in the cultures like a dear friend of mine living in China in the Foreign office-how difficult it must be to place things like constructs of human rights into the dialogs and know what you are standing on. Like that ever shifting base of sand in the hourglass. Lots of luck.. We want everyone to have it, human rights, overlook the fact we deny it at home with blithe disregard when the bag lady is at the corner and then have a great deal to say to the world about systems of their behavior. By the time you have completed this book you have had a tour through the historical perspective of Confucianism, and now have a bit more to look on Tiananmen and our favored nation...and it will be valuable information if you want to consider the relationship of an individual to the nation-state, due process, harmony and balance and free thinking, constitutionalism, rule of law.(opps I said that) ...the older I am the more the confusion aspect of knowing what to do and acting with intelligence is something to be valued. Maybe my question years ago wasn't so stupid, maybe it was just naive. What occurred in China under Mao has been something I have read about in depth, its change under later leadership, America's relationship to China, well it is important and understanding of this civilization fascinating..worth every brain cell I have.

"Nevertheless to be humane is not easy. He (Confucious) insisted one should try (to be humane though hard to do). It will be a long journey, but anyone can take it by oneself without outside assistance. The starting point is not far away-once one puts one's mind to take the journey one is already there, and once on the road, no one, as far as Confucious knew, would lack the strength to continue.
Exactly how, then, can one try to be humane-how is one to behave oneself and love all human beings? Confucius suggested that there are certain rules to follow and that one can find these rules by oneself, or one can follow the rules found by others. This leads to an elaborate theory of norms. It begins with the simple observation that human beings are by nature similar, although they can become different due to different life experience. All men, sharing a similar human nature, can look into their own hearts and find there some basic feelings toward other human beings. This is particularly true of filial piety towards one's parents and a brotherly affection towards one's siblings. That is why these two feelings are said to be the very essence of humanity. And it is presumed that with these feelings one should naturally know how to treat one's parents and siblings and, by extension, other human beings. "

Well then I suppose Confucius is giving us a lot of credit.