Pennsylvania Steelworker: Fill & Download for Free

There are many, but the first to jump to mind was 1978′s The Deer Hunter.It's about the lives of three Pennsylvania steelworkers (played by Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage) and their friends and family, before, during, and after combat in Vietnam. The rest of the cast includes Meryl Streep, John Cazale (who was dying of Stage IV lung cancer during production, but nonetheless typically brilliant), George Dzundza, and Rutanya Alda.It's a brilliant film — exceptionally written, directed, and acted all around. Its Academy Awards for Best Picture and Director (Michael Cimino) were wholly deserved.It's also one of the most gut-wrenching, heartbreaking films you'll ever see. I wouldn't dare watch it in my present state of mind. But if you're feeling emotionally strong, give it a go. It's worth it.

No question one of the best films ever made, if not the best ever, is the 1957 classic, “Paths of Glory.” Directed by the legendary Stanley Kubrick, it depicts the dehumanizing horror and senselessness of war. Based on a novel by Humphrey Cobb and set during the First World War, Kubrick, captures the macabre futility, the horror in the trenches and the dehumanization of the human spirt. It depicts the leader’s arrogant incompetence as they repeatedly order pointless suicidal attacks and when some of the soldiers refuse the orders they are sentenced to die in front of a firing squad.Paths of Glory is a haunting, exquisitely photographed dissection of the absurdity of the military machine and its capacity to dehumanize, which is a theme Kubrick would pursue throughout his career.Another memorable film that ranks high is Michael Cimino’s epic, “The Deer Hunter.” Cimino captures the the disillusionment and the patriotic melancholy of three Pennsylvania steelworkers who are thrown into a hell hole called Vietnam. The soldiers were drafted into this war and left behind loved ones and are never the same again after experiencing the cruelty and horror of a senseless war that, in the end, claimed the live of over, 50,000 US soldiers and 10 million Vietnamese. Yes, 10 million.The third war film would have to be either Saving Private Ryan, (Spielberg) or Apocalypse Now (Coppola)- both films present a disturbing vision of the harrowing effects war and violence has on the human spirit and the people it touches.In “Ryan, a scene that depicts the capacity for war to engender violence if perfectly captured in a scene where a timid soldier witnesses a German soldier fight an American. The German finally gets the better of him and slowly kills him after managing to get on top and while pinning him to the ground slowly stabs him to death. When he leaves he encounters an American soldier, fully armed who is terrified and is sobbing over what he witnessed. The soldier does nothing as the German walks by him. At the end of the film, after this German is captured the same soldier is standing guard over the German prisoners, this German call out that this soldier, who witnessed the previous stabbing is a coward, and afraid and as the German takes a step toward him, the American soldier, without battling an eye shoots him dead.War is evil unless it is waged to defend one’s self or to throw off an oppressor. None of the wars America has waged in the 20th Century fulfill this criteria.

Easier said than done but fix the economy. When people are satisfied with their economic situation and outlook they rarely get angry enough to join this type of movement. Without the anger and fear that drives both nationalism and populism, there isn't much of substance there.Maybe I’m being captain obvious but happy people don’t worry too much about what their government or other people are doing because well…they’re happy. But where you’ve got real problems is if a large segment of population is unhappy and feels like they are being ignored in favor of someone else. It doesn’t much matter whether it’s true or not, what matters is that they feel that way and to them it feels unfair.We saw it in the last election and in the rise of labeling the mainstream media as fake and biased. Every time the media pointed to a statistic to show that the economy was improving and things were getting better, some people looked around them and said, “like hell it is”. That made it far easier for them to buy into the view that the government was favoring some other group (coastal elites, immigrants, refugees, what-have-you) at their expense.It boggled my mind during this past election cycle how often something like transgender bathroom rights came up in discussions right next to unemployment. Perhaps some people are seeing it as the destruction of the moral fabric of society or something but jobs aren’t going to come back just because you’ve prevented people from using a bathroom or from getting married. PC culture has nothing to do with higher insurance rates, feminism is not the reason that you don’t have a girlfriend, videogames are not the reason why people assault each other and I could go on but I’ll stop here ’cause it’s turning into a rant. Anyway, I’m sure that everyone does understand this but it’s very easy to turn one or two societal issues into “society is fucked” and “everything sucks, the world is going to hell in a handbasket”.The trouble with this line of thinking is that it tends to become an ‘either-or’ scenario - like either you’re for environmental protection or you’re for the rights of Pennsylvania steelworkers. Or either you care about refugees or you care about Americans. For some inexplicable reason, there are people who really think that you can’t do both. It doesn’t have to be that way and I think Hillary summed it up in her campaign slogan “Stronger Together”.We really are stronger together, and particularly when we recognize that the solution to one set of problems is not just to cause a different set of problems for someone else.