During the Great Depression, times got hard, and men turned cold. However, I think they lacked a malice that I see growing.
For example, feed sack fabric. During the Great Depression, companies, without coordination, started printing flower patterns and prints on grain sacks, because they knew that the poor had to use them for clothing, so without co-ordinating, nor legislation, they performed a mercy. Zoos turned a blind eye to fishing at night, while libraries stayed open or even simply left themselves unlocked.
In a culture that shares definitions of what virtue is, such things are possible.
I'm watching a great many people defending the complete garbage of, as I've called it before, rage bait pacification that is "Citizen Vigilante". I've described it as Power larping, as softcore porn, and as a fantastically boring movie that I regret the time I spent watching, and I have watched Battle Beyond the Stars more than once, which should tell you much.
And why? Why do I loathe this film so much? Simple, really. I hate it not for itself, but what it reveals about the men to whom it appeals.
For example, while I completely agree that the forced slow invasion of the United States is an extremely bad thing (again, you need shared virtues), resolution of it through hooting over shooting a family seems to undermine the point somewhat that we need to resolve it to keep our own families safe. Taking vengeance for a raped teenager while acting as landlord to pimps and buying their trade seems something of a contradiction.
If I had to guess, this movie is on some level an attempt to shake loose people like me from supporting such movements. We want good neighbors through good fences, not a genocide dressed in borrowed righteousness, and so it has been in some ways a very successful film indeed.
Then again, perhaps Boll is every inch the idiot that his "writing" proclaims him to be.
EDIT: I forgot to tie these together. There's a reason that the two ideas matter in tandem.
In the Great Depression, we treated our neighbors as people, and helped each other through.
In the depression coming (and no, it isn't here yet; life still has a vague resemblance to what you knew), my chief concern is that this kind of garbage will have burned the soul out of ourselves, and such willingness to engage in community will have been lost.
That concept; hardening ourselves to evil in the name of addressing evil, is worse than the disease the backers of this flick claim to be addressing.
“Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me!”
- *J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings