when you pick up a handful of sand and you throw it with all your might, it doesn't go anywhere. instantaneous disintegration. poof.
add a spoonful of water. pack the sand together. now, hurled, the dark sphere cuts through the air, almost to the limit of your vision, becomes a speck, its impact perhaps inaudible. density, compactness, minimal surface area.
of late, i have lost some of my density, some compactness. surface area increasing. desiccation. accelerated dissipation of precious momentum. who stole my spoonful of water?
well but anyway. that's my own personal existential crisis and unrelated to the interesting and universal things i have to share with you today. over the past few weeks i saw three really remarkable documentaries. shockingly, i actually watched two of them on television. twice, i wandered through the living room just as my dad turned on a pbs documentary which caught my attention, and i sat and watched till the end because both of them were riveting.
The Released (or, Why You Are So Lucky to Have the Brain You Have.) the first was a frontline doc about the fate of mentally ill people who go through the prison system and what becomes of them afterward. "This year alone, more than 700,000 people will leave prison, more than half of them mentally ill. Typically, these offenders leave prison with a bus ticket, $75 in cash, and two weeks' worth of medication. Studies show that within 18 months, nearly two thirds of mentally ill offenders -- often poor and cut off from friends and family -- are re-arrested." i can't express how much i think everyone should watch this. (here) no, not so you can fix the System. watching this won't make you fix the System. that's impossible. but if you watch this, then anytime you ever feel like your lot in life is unfair, when you burn the turkey or your landlord raises the rent or your knee crumples, you can remember this program, and realise how incredibly lucky you are. which, mind you, does not in any way imply you ought to feel "grateful" for being so lucky. that's the worst reaction a person could have. grateful to whom? because if you decide to feel grateful for being so lucky, that means believing you were chosen to receive this extraordinary blessing, which means you weren't lucky at all. if you were chosen to be so much better off, then surely you must have deserved to be chosen. a Power that chooses to smite some and bless others would obviously choose to bless the good and smite the wicked. this would appear to be an inescapable chain of reasoning (usually confined to the penumbra of consciousness, i think). so feeling thankful for a stroke of good luck is pure hubris, the exact opposite of humility. so don't. if you absolutely must feel something about being so lucky, then feel guilty, and go loan some money on kiva. not saying you should feel guilty. you shouldn't. but it's nowhere near as bad as feeling grateful.
yes, i told you what you should and should not feel. ok, on to number two...
Wings of Defeat (or, Why You Are So Lucky to Be Living in 2009 Instead of 1939) if that one doesn't make you realise how lucky you are, this one will. well, it would if you could see it, but unfortunately, it might not be so easy to see. it was "Wings of Defeat", about the japanese kamikaze pilots at the end of world war II. it might be replayed on your pbs station this month (on the program "independent lens". check your listings. if you get the new york station WNET, it's on may 22 at 10pm). after that, i guess you'd have to buy it (i doubt it will make it to netflix) or torrent it (also doubtful). anyway, here's the trailer:
so the amazing thing being that they actually had a handful of kamikaze pilots to interview, because sometimes they would go out to die but their plane would have a mechanical failure, or they'd get into a dogfight and get shot up, and have to ditch without crashing into an american ship. so here are these 80-year-old men, talking about what it's like to have SIX DECADES of life granted to them by sheer dumb luck. most of their friends dead. their country utterly destroyed. they are next. but then, for no reason, no, they are not next. they get sixty more years.
also, it spent a lot of time talking about civilian japanese life during the war, especially towards the end, when teenage girls were sharpening bamboo spears to use against american soldiers if an invasion came. fascinating.
it hits me again and again when i learn about history - how incredibly easy life is today. so much talk these days about the current crisis, comparing it to the challenges of the 30s and 40s. absolutely absurd, comparing a crisis where people lose 40% of their 401(k) and 5% of the workforce get laid off, to a period when entire nations were immolated. cities burnt to cinders. a generation wiped out of existence. there is no comparison.
Up the Yangtze (or, Why You Are So Lucky to Be Who You Are, and Not One of the 900,000,000 Peasants of China) i'm running out of steam here. but this one is great, too. the fate of a chinese peasant girl who goes to work on a sightseeing ship while the three gorges dam project floods her family out of their home. china is endlessly fascinating. paradoxes piled upon contradictions heaped upon bitter irony. the divide between the rich and poor there is a chasm, which people who love to criticise the economic inequality in western capitalist societies would do well to study. it's on netflix. (here)
