I rewatched Forrest Gump, the classic 1990s Tom Hanks movie. It made me cry and broke my heart even more than when I first saw it.

Gump starts off overcome by emotion. He has already been through everything which he has already detailed in full. The people on the park bench give him.a wide range of responses. Some just flat out don't believe what he is saying, while others whel up.

In our modern world, Gump would have had to tell his story online, in a blog or in a YouTube video, but his own personal story would more than likely have fallen on deaf ears. You hardly see people talking in public, let alone to someone on a park bench.

Surely there are men like Forrest Gump today. There is no military draft by which they would be compelled to become brothers. A modern day Forrest may never have met Bubba, or if he did, it'd be under much different circumstances.

There is deep empathy in the portrayal of Bubba and the battle leading up to his death. Modern movies are far more gratuitous, with violence that is somewhere in between cartoonish and pornographic.

A roommate I had in Oregon once asked if, after the Pulse nightclub shooting, we were in "some kind of a social war." Mass shootings, cancel culture, police shootings - the war actually seems to be here at home now, instead of abroad.

There were initially plans in the late 1990s for a Forrest Gump sequel, which would portray him as witness of the Oklahoma City bombing and with his son having obtained AIDS from Jenny. That comes frighteningly close to our modern situation.

Unfortunately, women like Jenny still do very much exist, with all the same persistent challenges. #metoo was their moment. Singing naked with a guitar seems like child's play compared to the brutality of high speed internet pornography. How many of the lives of those nameless women end up like Jenny's? How many men involved in that trade end up beat up, threatened or in jail like Jenny's many awful boyfriends?

The news today might not even cover Forrest Gump's run. We have complained quite a bit here on Dagblog about how actual policy of the Biden administration isn't reported. It's all cultural conflict all the time. I actually met a black gentleman a few years ago who biked the whole country. He didn't have a news team swirling around him.

If anyone did report it, it would be some specialty publication on the Internet somewhere. Jenny may have caught that story but it'd be a whole lot less likely than a story broadcast on network TV.

Gump would likely have become one of the many anti social men which we hear about and meet. The world certainly gave Forrest Gump a hard time, asking if he was "stupid or something" his entire life, but there was a place for him in that world nonetheless.

We have a lonely society now in which he likely would not have had a place. It's questionable if there's a place in it for any of us, hince why so many of us seemed to accept being locked down and wearing masks so enthusiastically. Maybe we are all stupid or something.