But in the 1985 Star Wars TV movie Ewoks: Battle for Endor, presumably aimed at children, young Cindel (Aubree Miller) watches as her parents and brother are murdered in front of her. She's maybe 8 years old, tops. And the reason why her entire family is slaughtered? Because this bizarre Star Wars movie didn't want a cute little girl to have a human family, but instead, she had to get adopted by the Ewoks.
I had just started teaching at a school in the Bekaa valley when war broke out in September 2024. Within days, an Israeli bomb tore through my family home. One minute we were eating lunch, the next the walls were collapsing around us and on to my car outside. I had spent three years saving for that Honda Civic, so when I saw it destroyed, I broke down in tears.
You don't have to be Catholic to be horrified by bullets shattering stained-glass windows to kill Catholic school children, while they're at a "back to school" Mass, as we saw in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning. But as a Catholic school kid who attended many of those Masses (plus many other holidays that required all-school Masses), I can see it. Too clearly.
