Occasionally I am asked about a favorite or influential movie. I find it hard to answer as their have been many but two lesser ones occur to me today.
The first is What’s It All About Alfie.
The quintessential question. Why did God put me here?
Like most people, over my life I have answered that based on my birth circumstances.
In ninth grade, you would find me at mass every day, and also Vespers and Stations of the Cross and the entire nine yards of Roman Catholic ritual.
A half decade later, you would find me on the University of Minnesota campus, in my full dress Navy Midshipmen uniform, in an era where antiwar sentiment was hot and getting hotter.
As a Catholic, as an American my sense of purpose was wrapped up in the circumstances of my birth.
The second movie was a bit more obscure, called Stop The Earth I Want To Get Off!
While I remember nothing about the movie, I do remember its impact. Disconcerted feelings of doubt.
What if I had been born of different parents in Tehran or of Shinto parents in Japan?
How would a just and merciful God favor one over the other?
At the time, the generation gap was clearly defined.
As with many baby boomers I had seen the underbelly of America in nightly news in my youth, watching the civil rights movement giving question to the highest self image we wanted to believe our nation stood represented.
And as the Vietnam war continued other questions came to the fore. To my generation, the US was not all it might be.
Our parents had a different view. After all, America for them was a place of pride in their own accomplishment, that of standing up to nationalist in Germany and Japan bent on world conquest. When they said they were going to “Keep the Oil” they meant it.
So the probably accurately describe Greatest Generation say America as a place of Pride. One that not only won a war, but set up institutions to keep the peace in Europe ending tens of centuries of almost constant wars. For them the remaining ills of our society were secondary.
Thus the Boomers sought a Revolution, and our parents like Archie Bunker suggested that We Love America or Leave It.
In 1972 an image emerged.
Now they say a picture is worth a thousand words.
This picture was worth at least 4.5 billion words.
Nicknamed the Blue Marble, it was taken by
Apollo 17 on the last Moon mission.
The image pierced through the gloom of the era. The Whole Earth, Space ship Earth, the ideal of being World Citizens, of caring for the planet and its peoples.
A sense of commonality. Humankind.
The worlds poor were our poor, the world ills our ills. Blessed were the peacemakers.
Ronald Reagan not many years later would constantly talk of America as a Shinning City on the Hill.
His vision he described as teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.
In recent months, a cloud has appeared overhead that has dimmed the shinning city.
A cloud of inward thinking, nationalism and exclusion.
I fear that cloud is full of lightening and capable of destructive tornadoes.
I pray that it will pass by without too much damage.
I want to believe it is just a historical artifact. Like a pause in the stock markets advance. A setback that will serve to refresh and lead to ever higher values, and that the time will soon come when we can once again build on a global dream.
In closing, let me answer Alfie’s question. What is it all about. Accumulating wisdom, and then sharing it as effectively as possible. I hope I have done at least a little of that today.