Last week I watched the 80’s film “The Big Chill.” During the scene where a suicide victim was eulogized, the pastor spoke elegantly about lost hope. Since I did not catch the remarks verbatim I looked up what I remembered of the quote on Google. One citation linked to a blog entry that asked a question that I found profoundly interesting and very apropos for the current day.
Quote:
In the movie "The Big Chill" during the funeral scene when the preacher asked, “Are not the satisfactions of being a good man among our common men great enough to sustain us any more? Where did Alex's hope go? Maybe that is the small resolution we can take from here today. To try to regain that hope that must have eluded Alex."
I think about my grandparents and their generation - 2 of my grandparents are alive and in their 90's now. And for them, the satisfactions of being a good man were and are enough to sustain them. I watched that sense of satisfaction start slipping away in my parents generation, and now here in mine, it seems to be utterly gone.
I also think that the America my grandparents were young in has changed in that the world, the country, the place we have created is no longer supportive of such satisfactions. Yet, that is a chicken and egg scenario - which shift came first, the structural or the individual. Regardless, we have created a place that is very hard to walk through with grace.
Perhaps the "how" can be answered better once America re-establishes an identity for itself, for it is difficult to be a part of something greater than yourself when you have no idea what that something is. In other words, when we are trying to define the new American Dream, I think what needs to happen first is the definition of American.
having never seen the movie Fight Club, i first heard this quote in song by The Kleptones, but i immediately thought it summed up my view of America (and Canada to a certain extent) today
I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy **** we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
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