Like the movie "Coco" I recently watched. Twice. It's a cool movie. The animation was out of this world! The story was predictably Disney but I liked the Mexican spin. I like Mariachi guitar music a lot. The day after I watched it for the first time everybody in my dreams had Spanish accents. Miguel sort of rose from the dead in that movie. Sort of. He visited the dead then came back to the living. The part of that movie that stuck with me was the part about the people fading away into, what?, second death? when they are forgotten. And I thought to myself, "Self, I haven't even died yet and I've been forgotten by a lot of people."
So what, I wondered, could I do to make myself more memorable? I am pretty darn good at blogging so I thought I'd make this my "Remember Me" blog. You'll get that if you watch "Coco." Really, watch it, it's great!
Movie number one: "A Few Good Men." I remember back in the 80's when I first watched that movie kinda feeling a little bit on Jack Nicholson's side. Colonel Jessup. We all know the famous speech. "You can't handle the truth!" But a couple of the things he says after that part are the things that I got thinking about recently. "I have a greater responsibility that you can possibly fathom!" and "All you did today is weaken a nation. That's all you did." I remember thinking the whole conversation between Dawson and Downey about why they were found innocent but still not allowed back into the military. "What did we do wrong? We didn't do anything wrong!" Dawson said. "Yeah we did. We were supposed to fight for the people who couldn't fight for themselves. We were supposed to fight for Willy." Then with the whole salute to Dan Kaffee, (Tom Cruise), as he leaves the room, it almost overhollywooded it to the point of the red nose scene in Patch Adams or the Captain my Captain scene standing on the desks in Dead Poet's Society. But let's concentrate on the not so melodramatic parts of the movie.
I have a great deal of respect for training. And I can relate to how the military can find it useful to have soldiers act without thinking sometimes. I don't know much about the military from experience, but in sports I have learned to stickhandle a puck or ball without looking at it over many hours of hockey playing. In baseball, I can pull an inside pitch or go with an outside pitch even though the ball is coming far too fast to think about doing that. They call it muscle memory in sport. You can't think, you just have to repeat it so many times that it becomes instinctive.
I suppose for the military's purposes, a perfect soldier would be the one who doesn't think, just does. I love the scene in Forrest Gump when he puts the gun together really fast and the sergeant asks why he did it so well and Gump says, "Because you told me to, SERGEANT!" The sergeant is highly impressed and says that Gump might someday become a general if he keeps acting without thinking.
This was not exactly the most accurate statement. The generals are the ones who actually ARE supposed to be doing the thinking. Other officers like Jessup too. And if they give an order, since they are the ones who EARNED the right to do the thinking, the order is NEVER to be questioned. This is the way the military operates. Pretty much all militaries. Is it just me, just my life experience, or is there anyone else out there who thinks this might be giving a far too juicy bone to some dogs and expecting them not to eat it?
I'll give you launch codes and military strategies. You can have secrecy for those since the power to blow the world up about 100 times over really IS a huge responsibility. A self-created responsibility, but a great one nonetheless. So you can have your secrecy and your place above any questioning for those. But when people start abusing this untouchability and they start committing human rights violations like waterboarding, giving "code reds," or other torture; when they start committing moral offenses like tapping phone lines or tracking internet usage; when they start committing crimes like killing innocent people, and expecting them to be covered "under the very blanket" of secrecy that covers things that it makes sense to cover, then, NO, SIR, Colonel Jessup, it's not weakening a country to expose that behavior. It's strengthening it. Furthermore, yours is not a greater responsibility than we can all possibly fathom. We all, and I'm talking about every other human being, have a greater responsibility!
What about a contract? What if you want something you can only really get one place and sign a contract? Like we all did without reading it when we signed up for Facebook. Is it okay for them to say, "Well in the contract, it said you willingly surrender your first born child to Mark Zuckerberg." What if you sign a contract that has a non-disclosure clause in it? THEN is it right for you to tell somebody about things that are just wrong being done at your workplace? This is when WE, the regular people have a responsibility that supersedes or contracts or our jobs or even Colonel Jessup's orders. We have a responsibility to mankind. To the human race. This is one of those deteriorating values and ideals I've been blogging about. Why do you suppose it's deteriorating? Why does it sound corny to even say we all have a responsibility to each other? It shouldn't, but it does.
I believe no order should ever be given, no secrecy agreement should ever be signed, no contract should ever be legally binding without two words, and if these two words are not present, I believe, as the spirit of our law at one time also upheld, that these two words should be implicit. These words are, "within reason." THIS is the responsibility that human beings and only human beings have been trusted with. REASON. And it is a great power we have over all other species. As Spiderman knows, with great power comes great responsibility.
This is one of the best movie scenes ever. It's funny, but nowadays it's also very serious.
It's from Billy Madison. The movie is a comedy, but sometimes comedians are the people who make us think the most. Doing something good like this has a way of multiplying. In fact, there are those who believe that every good deed has a butterfly effect that reaches everybody directly or indirectly. EVERYBODY! The same is believed for selfish deeds. It's not very hard to imagine. Let's say, for instance, that this guy doesn't kill Billy Madison. Billy doesn't have to go on to cure Cancer to affect the entire human race. He could do unbelievably simple things for other human beings that lead to others and others and others and soon just one act of kindness can blossom into a good deed for 7 billion people! Say they really DO meet for coffee. Then they become friends. Then this guy sees that people can change and doesn't kill the others on his list. Now every good thing those other people do for the rest of their lives to thousands of other people would not have happened if not for this one phone call. They didn't know it, but they were dead. Imagine now that they find out how close they came to death. They are now, (kinda), back from the dead. How GOOD would these people be knowing that every single new day is a gift? Raymond K. Hessel knows.
Remember this scene in Fight Club when Tyler Durdan holds a gun to Raymond K. Hessel's head? I sometimes wish somebody could hold a gun to everybody's head every day. THEN we'd be able to let that which truly does not matter slide. Then we'd all be better people too. And as shitty as the world is now? That's how awesome it would be!
Do you see how the butterfly effect works here? But it works the very same for bad deeds. THIS is a far greater responsibility than any other. And it's being forgotten about. More accurately, it's one of those super important things in all of our lives that we are being distracted from. Strategically distracted.
But who is distracting us from cultivating our collective powers and unleashing our whole person? This is what Leonardo da Vinci reckoned we should all be busying ourselves with. But we're not. WHY not? Because we're too busy and burdened with rules and "musts" that we retreat into our hibernative lives of antisociality. The height of absurdity is that the "social" network, the internet, has become the main substitute for human connection that has lead to this collective social stuntedness.
We all know that playing a game of Minecraft or Call of Duty with strangers, is not the same as going bowling on Wednesday nights. Online friends are ghosts. We are perfectly safe to just barely acknowledge their humanity, and treat them in ways that differ from our social interaction with REAL people. That's why it's called "virtual" reality, not real reality.
The problem I see arising is as people spend more and more time with ghost friends, our social habits, our online quasi-politeness, transfers into the real world. This indefatigably chips away at common sense, common courtesy and the common good. We used to worry about this happening with people who watch too much TV. Internet and phone mentoring are worse. I say that with the inference that media is a strong mentor. TV shaped the way people acted and thought. But the internet and phone interconnectivity are even more powerful in making us good or bad people.
How ironic is that? Real people are taking a back seat to ghost people in developing human beings socially. But this is why one of the most important issue of our lifetimes is happening right now to little or no fanfare. The deterioration of "net neutrality" will take away our chance of using this massive power for good and turn it into a massive power for bad. It has already begun and it's our responsibility to reverse the trends toward the internet being monopolized by the greedy and corrupt. But the greedy and corrupt don't want us to concentrate on that. So they strategically distract us with the meaningless.
In Barack Obama's recent interview on David Letterman's new show he says, "One of the biggest challenges to our democracy is that we don't share a common baseline of facts." He goes on to say that three different people could Google the word "Egypt" and come up with three completely different sets of facts according to the information that has been collected about them. The information we receive on the internet is increasingly being sold and not told to us. This creates divergent information about similar topics that will keep us arguing. The disparate findings on almost anything will have us fighting over politics, world events, the environment, science, religion, if toilet paper should go over or under and it divides instead of uniting. It blunts the possibility of a more united world.
This is the issue with the Zuckerberg hearings to my understanding. Yes, we all "agreed" to the contract so we could play Words With Friends with our friends, but does that give Zuckerberg the right to do whatever he wants? Shouldn't it say, even in the Zuckerberg contract, WITHIN REASON? I mean, what if some stupid moron Messengers launch codes to someone else. ACCURATE launch codes! Does Zuckerberg have the right to sell them to the highest bidder? Then we'd have people hacking into computers and launching American nukes. Does anybody think that's okay because, hey, somebody signed a contract. You can write a thousand dollar bonus into a contract like the one for Facebook and nobody will collect it. It's been proven. But because of this contract we all signed without reading, Google, Facebook and other sites will direct me to a whole different set of facts than somebody else. I want ALL the facts, not just the ones some algorithms have decided I should be fed. So how do we regulate all this? By using the common sense and reason that only we possess.
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is being remade!
The original Bill & Ted might have the best line in a movie ever. "Be excellent to each other!" I bet it's no coincidence that George Carlin was in it. I wonder if it was George, the central figure in my personal comedian Mt. Rushmore, that inspired that philosophical gem. This line is the bottom line, folks! And we're just not being excellent to each other. If we were more excellent to each other, there'd be no thought put into coming to the aid of those who can't help themselves. It would be our responsibility and it would be understood. We wouldn't need it to be forced into us at gunpoint like Raymond K. Hessel. If we were all excellent to each other on a daily basis, we'd be reminded on a daily basis of how important and self-perpetualizing it can be.
But I can hear people now saying, "Yeah and if we ever got to that point, SOMEBODY would take advantage of all the love and kindness, exploit people and get rich off it." Well, that is what has happened, isn't it? It's what we are reminded of on a daily basis and what is self-perpetualizing. It's what has driven us into our defensive, protective, untrusting, competitive, secretive, basically paranoid states of mind and what has got us into this mess we're in right now.
So the solution is very simple: we use our reason to find those people who will take advantage of other people's kindness for selfish reasons and eliminate them from society. Jails are everywhere but these people are not in them. These people are running industry, banks and politics. The selfishness that is ruining the world has become a virtue. That is what we need to change.
Leastaways, that's what I reckon.
Post script: I'm looking forward to reading "The Common Good" by Robert Reich because I think he might reckon so too.
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