Forging Liberty
I got to Mombo’s after a week’s worth of work, and she fixed us a meal of green rice casserole, oven baked fish and sliced tomatoes. We decided to watch the first episodes of the the HBO mini-series that Deb had taped for me–JOHN ADAMS.
It stars Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney, David Morse, and Tom Wilkinson. Toms Hanks, as executive producer, took David McCullough’s Pulitzer prizing winning book and made an amazing film. It did the book justice to produce a mini-series rather than a feature length film, and the acting quality is beyond reproach. I highly recommend the viewing time, and hope to attack the book myself this summer (or 1776, whichever is in at the library at the time). Mom and I have been interested in reading together about John and Abigail since we read THOSE WHO LOVE years ago.
I found my lost Netflix dvd of the first season of “24” last week and started to watch the series from the beginning. It is easy to get caught up in the character of Jack Bauer, whose honor is beyond reproach, who will risk everything to defend his country. But he’s fiction. I don’t think I truly realize what men like John Adams risked. He wasn’t Kiefer Sullivan or Paul Giamatti. He was just a man, the son of a farmer and a farmer himself, father and husband, dependent on the love and advice of his wife, Abigail, schooled in the law that he loved above all, and making the decision, from his perspective, to follow a law greater than the laws of his mother country, the law of liberty. What they endured is hard for us to imagine. Would we have made those decisions for ourselves and future generations? We still have several episodes to watch, and much has yet to happen. It makes me mindful to pray for my country.