More than a Movie

My boys asked the other day if someone will make this into a movie.   Our most immediate answer to this question was “yes, of course, it will be made into a movie.”  My sense was this would be a lot like my childhood.  It was filled with stories of the holocaust, the depression, the civil rights movement and thousands of years of horrible things.   What did all the stories get us?  We didn’t learn from the lessons in our past.  We are destroying our environment.  We are killing ourselves and our children with toxins, poisons, plastics, and chemicals.   We have more hate and anger spreading quicker than any virus could.  We are ignoring the melting ice caps as we look at computer models.  The computer models have told us we have time, all the while the ice has melted in our cups.

It’s so much more than a movie.  Unfortunately, it’s a movie that seems will be watched and forgotten.  Movies are made for the generations of people alive that have an interest.   If you don’t believe me, just look at the evidence in our history.  Machiavelli wrote about politics hundreds of years ago that just as well have been written today.  The same could be said of the great writers in ancient China.  The Bible applies to people today most likely for the same reasons.

Covid-19 is just a symptom of the greater failure of humanity to learn and apply these learnings in a boundless way.   Our global connected world may not doom us to extinction at this very moment but I suppose the story is written.   If aliens were to come back and look at us the same way we look at dinosaurs it would be very confusing.   If they found articles of our existence,  they would probably find that we are great storytellers who never learned how to learn from our own stories.  We only learned how to retell the story.

That’s what we do.  We tell the same stories over and over to ourselves.  We are entertained or enlightened by them but we actually don’t learn or change our behavior.  For as long as people have existed there were the ones that have stuff and the ones that don’t.  There are the people who have power over others and there are the people oppressed by others.   If there were subtle differences like green eyes vs blue eyes, it would have been the same thing as black or white.   We can’t help ourselves but find a reason to see the differences in others so that we can associate ourselves with a pack of some form.

In the end, all of our science just makes us fancy ants.  We can’t see past the fourth wall or for that matter, we look up and see the light from a magnifying glass and ignore it as it burns us to shreds.

What do we do in all this madness?  I suppose if I stick with the ant analogy, we just hang out inside the mound until this passes.

Someone will make a billion-dollar blockbuster hit about Covid-19.  It will be a compelling and riveting story about a girl in China trying to warn the US of the impending infection.  The US and the rest of the world will have ignored her plea.  The Chinese authorities will have locked her up and the end of the movie will be little bubbles popping up on a computer screen where the virus spread throughout the world.
I just hope all of us are alive long enough to enjoy the film.