Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings
Tax the Rich
Movie Monday
I realized a long time ago that most voters don't live in a politically wonky world. I don't either though my daily reading about political/economic/historical events has me on the fringes of this world and probably would enable me to hold my own in a politically wonky heated discussion.
But in spite of the fact that good skills in analyzing political rhetoric and then informed voting may be the important factors as to the degree of comfort their futures hold, most voters worry about getting kids to soccer practice, paying bills, gossip at work. looking for a better job - perhaps a mundane list, but that's where they live.
I came into a conversation with our pool lifeguard last week as I heard a resident extolling loudly: But you must vote. This is your future. I think the guard was happy to get away and she told me that she knew nothing about the national candidates, politics were never a topic in her home and she didn't get much of civics while she was in school. I told her I was voting for Obama because of the anti-abortion platform of the Republicans and while she agreed with pro-choice, I could tell this issue wan't going to get her to the ballot box.
She was seriously against the fact that students were defaulting on loans. (As I remember the framing of this issue, I think the horror of student loan default is a talking point of the right so, though I didn't ask, I wouldn't be surprised if Fox News wasn't the channel of choice on her parents" TV.)
I touched briefly on the recent Gary Hart op-ed piece saying that Americans didn't feel any civic duty to their country and suggested that in exchange for free undergraduate college, graduates give 2 years of national service (teaching, health care, military, etc.) thus producing citizens with skills to contribute to their country without saddling them with lifelong debt. She seemed to like that idea also.
So I left her with the advice to read as much as she could about the candidates and try to separate the truth from the fiction. I told her to use the scientific research skills she was learning in her college courses to plod through all the propaganda. I didn't leave this conversation thinking that I had set her on the path to the ballot box nor that she would even make an "informed beyond the ever-present right-wing propaganda" voting choice.
Which brings me through the back door so-to-speak to my movie pick: Tomorrow When The World Begins. TWTWB, like The Hunger Games, is based on a popular teen trilogy where teens are placed in dangerous situations and must make serious choices to save themselves and the world.
Heavy stuff but there is a huge difference, a crucial difference, between these movies. From Box Office MoJo, TWTWB grossed $16M, THG grossed $600+M. Future installments of the latter is ensured while the former may sink into the retirement home for box office duds.
I saw value in Tomorrow When The War Begins because this movie made me feel, for the first time, what a country's invasion was like. Told through the eyes of a handful of teens who "missed" all the initial trauma since they were away in a remote Australian camping location when the foreign army landed. Realizing soon what has happened (brought home swiftly as they sneak up on a make-shift concentration camp and watch prisoners being herded onto trucks or shot), they band together and start doing guerrilla damage to the invaders. As their tactics become more effective, the verisimilitude of this brave band of teens' effectiveness gets more difficult to accept. However, a good portion of the beginning of the movie with the bucolic camping trip followed by the realization that the world they thought they were returning to is no more was more effective to me than all the heroic resistance fighter WWII movies that Hollywood produced by the 100s.
I thought about this movie again after my poolside conversation and since I do believe that the US is in dire need of a civics curriculum on a national scale, I wondered if movie like Tomorrow When The War Begins could be used as one teaching tool. Unfortunately, almost all of the teen connection movies today are fantasy (Harry Potter), futuristic (The Hunger Games) or grossly silly (you add your choice here.)
In the US, we allow teens to vote at 18 (as we should since we allow them to die in the military at 17), but do we care if they cast an informed vote? I'm not thinking a viewing of TWTWB will lead to better citizenship but is there a market for teen movies which treats them like thinking creatures who have a stake in a realistic future? Or is the IMDb list the only future?:
No comments:
Post a Comment