Dear TNCP,
I am recommending to all my friends and your readers that they view the movie “12 Years as a Slave” which is presently showing at NCG and Celebration Theatres here in Lansing. The movie is very graphic, rated R, and likely to raise significant levels of anxiety, discomfort, and painful memories. But I believe it is a necessary type of exposure we sometimes face as we recall our national history and experience. I believe that we cannot realize why and where we are today, or where we are going in the future, in the vacuum of not knowing where we have been in the past. This movie is “difficult” to say the least.
Google and read about it on the internet before you bother to go to see it. I recommend it to all my friends who can stomach the vivid, graphic, and painful true story and scenes in that film. It is one you will not forget.
Howard Spence
This was printed in the November 17, 2013 – November 30, 2013 Edition
