What do people do on Christmas Eve when they don’t celebrate Christmas? They go to the movies since that is pretty much the only thing you can do. In anticipation of the crowds, Darren and I bought tickets online earlier in the day to see Charlie Wilson’s War. We had a failed attempt a few nights ago when the show was sold out as we were waiting to exchange our free passes for tickets.  This film has been generating quite a bit of buzz since its Golden Globe nomination, which came out before the film was released.

Charlie Wilson’s War is a drama starring Academy Award winners Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who were all excellent. The movie tells the political story of how a playboy congressman from Texas (played by Tom Hanks) and a beautiful Texas socialite (played by Julia Roberts) who team up with a renegade CIA agent (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) lead the most successful covert operation in history. Their fight led to the downfall of the Soviets in Afghanistan and the end of communism.

The movie exemplifies the US governments actions of funding Afghanistan’s fight against the Soviets and our country’s instrumental role in this world changing event.  Unfortunate however, after Afghanistan defeated the Soviets and their troops withdrew, our government did not see the need to help the Afghan people build an infrastructure, create an education system or provide them with aid to help establish their country as a nation. We gave the Afghan people weapons and taught them to fight. Little did we know that by not seeing things through we were creating a breeding ground that would eventually come back to haunt us in 2001 with the most devastating and horrific act of terrorism and violence on our own soil.

Is this movie a foreshadow of our future as a nation? Regardless of your political party or your feelings on whether or not we should have gone to war with Iraq, we did and now we have another country that is in desperate need for assistance in education, schools, roads, water systems – all the things that we dropped the ball on in Afghanistan. My guess is that all the “fat cats” in Washington, both Democrats and Republicans, are more concerned with winning re-election than learning from the past and they will walk away again. We have the power to prevent this, but our government will most likely bury their heads in the sand and ignore the situation. We will not escape the fact that history does repeat itself. How unfortunate for us all.