Little Murders

Little Murders - a play and movie by Jules Feiffer, 1970. Still; Alan Arkin.

Plot summary:

"A girl brings home her latest boyfriend to meet her parents. This is done against the background of random shootings that had just begun in NYC at the time the play was written, 1969. How the family's failings are magnified by the social confusion of the times is the crux of the plot."

I think of Feiffer's play everytime I hear about snipers and serial killers and killings in our Country's cities - such as the freeway sniper now active in Indiana. Violence it seems is apparently escalating once again. His play was rather prophetic in many ways, albeit a black comedy. For people in Lebanon and Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan, and not a few other places in the world, it is everyday life once again.

I am also reminded of Mother Teresa's prophetic words that made her listeners, the Clintons among them, rather uncomfortable:

"February 1997 - National Prayer Breakfast in Washington attended by President Clinton and the First Lady. 'What is taking place in America,' she said, 'is a war against the child. And if we accept that the mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another.'"

In the late '60's the musical "Hair" opened on Broadway and I was in NYC to see it, in one of the songs they shout out sexual terms for various sexual acts as a sort of declaration of sexual freedom. One could substitute those words in the same mantra like fashion regarding what has brought all of this upon us;

"Contraception"
"Sexual Promiscuity"
"Abortion"
"Homosexuality"
"Consumerism"
"Materialism"
"Indifferentism"
"Euthanasia"

On and on. Pope Paul VI in his encyclical "Humanae Vitae" also prophetically foretold what might happen to us in the future. (The future is now.)