Thursday, November 25, 2010

Privilege

It's rather earlier on Thanksgiving morning than I intended to be up. The cats are fed, the coffee is started, Bach's Brandenburg Concertos are playing, and I have the time before the bustling of the day -- yes, there will be bustling today, preparing the traditional Thanksgiving dinner and packing to travel -- begins to set down these musings.

I've spent a lot of time over the past year reading the thoughts of Internet sages on privilege, the unearned accumulation of advantage. This is nothing I set out to do. These various essays and rants were simply posted where I read anyway. No doubt this confession will affirm in some minds exactly the points about privilege. You see, I'm a 50 year old white male from the American South.

I've never had to remind anyone I was talking to that my eyes are on my face, not my chest. I've never seen employees anywhere I've shopped spending more time watching me to be sure I wasn't slipping merchandise into my pockets than waiting on the customers in front of them. I've never been turned away from voting. And what's more, I've never had to even think about these things.

Privilege.

If you're reading this and your primary assumption amounts to, "Well, it's about time he realized how lucky he is," may I suggest that you learn to recognize the blinders your high horse is wearing. You can learn from me as surely as I can from you.

I am incredibly grateful for the life I have, and even more, for the help I've had getting here. Yes, I have seized the opportunities that have come my way. Yes, I'd be stupid to pass up the advantages that life has afforded me, both for myself and my family.

And yet...

I am striving to live a life of of honesty and integrity. I can give up things so that others can have them and still get far more than I sacrificed. After all, life is hardly a zero-sum game.

On this Thanksgiving Day, I don't want to be treated the same as everyone else. I want everyone else to be treated the same as me.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

The Difference Between Legal And Fair

In my last post, I embedded a video from YouTube about a middle school football team using a particularly clever play to score a touchdown. And, in the limited context of the video, it is hilarious.

Frank Deford is one of the most insightful sportswriters ever, and he has some sobering thoughts on this play, put into a larger context:

...it is perfectly legal to act in a game. But the players who do that in the pros are not embarrassing the opposition. They're just trying to con the umpire. It's a benign bit of hustle that would've made for some good Aesop's Fables if old Aesop were around writing a sports blog nowadays.

But the Driscoll team didn't act instinctively to try to put one over on a ref. The middle schoolers didn't even come up with the ruse. Their coach dreamed up the play, and even participated in it, hollering from the sideline. The referees weren't victimized. In fact, they had to play along.

No, it was only the other team's kids who were embarrassed and belittled by a children's coach being a wise guy, a bully of sorts. It wasn't genius at all. Sure, it was legal, but it wasn't fair. Laugh at kids being outslicked by a grown-up, and you're cruel. That isn't sport.


You can read his full commentary here.

My children are all young adults, well past the age to participate in youth sports, but I still find it worthwhile to ask myself, how would they have felt to be on the other side of this legal play? How would I have felt for them? I suspect I would have tended towards Mr. Deford's position, and that gives me an uncomfortable feeling about myself.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Surprise!

I saw this on Good Morning America yesterday, and I laughed until the tears were rolling down my face and my belly hurt. It was worth it.


Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Hereafter


Hereafter is the story of three people touched by death.

Marie Lelay is an investigative journalist on vacation in Indonesia with her producer/lover. It is their last morning before returning to Paris, and she realizes her companion has not gotten any souvenirs for his kids. She tells him she is going shopping for them and asks him to come along, but he just wants to sleep as long as he can. As she is running her self-appointed errand, a tsunami strikes. She drowns, and then we're...somewhere else...with her. Back in our world, a couple of strangers try, and fail, to revive her, but she comes back on her own. Changed.

Marcus is a young boy, ten, maybe eleven. He seems a little ethereal to begin with, sweet, slight. His twin Jason, always wearing a cap, decisive, is Marcus' anchor in this world. In fact, Jason is the anchor of his family. We first see them getting their picture struck, paying the photographer with change scraped together dearly. Then, at home, they put the framed picture and a cupcake topped with a single candle out on the kitchen table, a birthday surprise for their Mum. She never shows up before they go to bed. The first thing we see the next morning is the photo and the cupcake, with the candle melted down all over it. The first thing we here is a loud knock on the door, followed by shouts demanding entrance. It's child protective services. Mum, you see, is a heroine addict. The twins, with Marcus following Jason's lead, work around the social workers, cleaning up the apartment, finding Mum and bringing her in the door just after the social worker, with bags of groceries. See, all is right with our world!

Once the social workers are gone, Mum sees the picture her boys made for her. Even as she's still coming down off her latest high, we see that she does love her sons and is trying. She says something about a drug that may help her kick the addiction. Jason -- strong, decisive Jason -- calls the chemist (we're in London), determines that he has the medicine, instructs Marcus to stay with Mum, and runs off to get help for Mum.

After he has gotten the medicine and is on his way home, Jason is accosted by some neighborhood toughs. "What's with the cap? What's in the bag? It's the basic we're bigger, we're bored, and you're our toy attitude. Only this time, Jason runs! But Jason can't outrun the lorry on the street. Unlike after Marie's drowning, no one tries to revive Jason. Marcus knows with a twin's certainty that something wrong has befallen his other half. When he arrives on the scene, he finds Jasosn' unbloodied cap, picks it up, dons it. He, too, is changed.

Those who sacrifice for others, it seems, are sacrificed along the way.

George Lonegan is a very rare thing, a genuine psychic. He can actually see that somewhere else Marie went while she was dead, and he can tell people the Truth. His brother Billy considers this a gift, something that is a license to print money. George considers it a curse, because the Truth sets him apart. And that being set apart is why he works as a longshoreman and takes a cooking class. His love of Charles Dickens is simply his own.

Every other "psychic" we see in the movie, and we see quite a few, is a charlatan. They each put on a show with scientific gadgets or candles and shadows or limited seating seminars when they're doing a reading or contacting the other side; it's all smoke and mirrors. George simply asks whomever he is reluctantly reaching beyond the veil for to let him hold their hands for a moment. "It makes a connection, and that helps", he tells them.

From this set up, we see how Marie moves from a hard-hitting journalist after her next expose to a seeker, asking "What happens to us when we die?"; how Marcus, wearer of his twin's cap and resident of the foster care system, persists in trying to reach Jason to tell him that he can't do this life alone and needs him back; how George is seeking connections. And we see how their stories eventually intertwine. This is where George is changed, not by death, but by life.

Of the actors, it's worth noting that Jay Mohr as Billy Lonegan plays an excellent sleaze. And Matt Damon...the man is a chameleon. I believe in him as totally as George Lonegan as I do in him as Jason Bourne.

The movie is paced slowly, deliberately, in a way that reminds me of Gattaca. Other than the tsunami and the car accident, there is no action, which is hard to believe of a Clint Eastwood directed movie. And, in the tsunami, where it awkwardly overruns those trying to flee it, we see that Eastwood is not at all at ease with CGI special effects.

The movie is all exposition and character study. As Lisa put it when we were talking about it, "I was expecting some great revelation."

You see, despite the advertising, Hereafter has next to nothing to do with the supernatural. That's a head fake, in the spirit of Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. This movie has to do with curiosity, persistence, integrity and connections. It's about how to live.