It’s spring break in Northern Michigan. Not being able to afford to get away, I indulge in a couple of guilty pleasures every year at this time. The first is watching more NCAA basketball than most would think humanly possible. The other is I watch a lot of movies. And with neither intent nor forethought, it just so happened that in two successive days I viewed the 2010 Oscar winning documentary “Inside Job” and the much older foreign film, “Motorcycle Diaries.”
“Inside Job” chronicles the 2008 financial meltdown, uncovering its causes, its major players, and the unprecedented corporate and governmental greed and collusion that made it all possible. “Motorcycle Diaries” depicts the several year odyssey through South America that one Ernesto Guevera, a bright young medical student, takes. It is, in fact, this journey that transforms Ernesto Guevera the medical student into Che Guevera. the vibrant revolutionary and tireless champion of the underclass,
The first of these two films, “Inside Job,” literally made me sick. I threw up. I was horrified and sickened by the senseless human tragedy that was and continues to be unleashed on so much of the world – including yours truly --in the form of totally orchestrated – and therefore totally avoidable – economic rape. Seeing CEO after CEO, with personal annual incomes in the hundreds of millions, testifying that they saw nothing unethical about advising their clients to invest in funds and derivatives that the CEO’s themselves were simultaneously betting against was almost as disgusting as seeing these same slimeballs raising their right hands as they accepted positions in our current president’s cabinet. Furthermore, most of these CEO’s and puppeteers actually managed to sell off all of their own stock in the very companies they worked for in the weeks just before the crisis hit, netting untold millions and even billions, while the people whose life savings and pensions they had supposedly been stewarding lost everything in the crash. And, of course, this documentary ends with stark white words on a jet black screen to the effect that “as of this moment, exactly none of these economic rapists have been charged, tried, or imprisoned. In fact, most of them – if they’re not among our president’s chief economic advisors – are on the faculty at places like Harvard and Stanford, training tomorrow’s financiers.
And then there was Che. At 21, with only his exams separating him from his medical degree, he takes a leave of absence from his training to travel by motorcycle from one end of South America to the other with his best friend, Alberto, also a med student. They leave with very few possessions, riding double on an old beat up motorcycle. They’ve got a map, a few dollars, and the dream of visiting some leper colonies and learning from the doctors and nurses in the trenches. Admittedly, they’re also hoping to see the world up close and get laid as often as possible. But the journey doesn’t go exactly as planned. Far sooner than they’d ever imagined, they run out of money, run their tired motorcycle into the ground, and wind up living among the poorest of the poor. They witness unemployed, destitute brothers sitting outside horrific and dangerous mines, hoping to get picked up as day laborers, knowing the chances of them coming out of the mines alive are slim. Despite numerous reasons to abandon their trip, at Che’s insistence they soldier on and make it to several of the bare bones leprosy clinics on their itinerary. And in the film’s most compelling scene, it is the duo’s final night at the last leper colony. It is also Che’s birthday. The clinic staff is throwing a party for him. After they sing Che the “Happy Birthday” song, he wanders outside the festive hall to the water’s edge and gazes across the lake where he can just make out the feint lights of the lepers’ compound. The facility is set up with the clinicians on one landmass across a huge lake from the lepers who live on another. The staff travels to and from the island each day by boat. Che begins to disrobe. Alberto comes out to check on him and asks him what he’s doing. Ernesto/Che says, “It’s my birthday and I want to spend it over there [he gestures to the lepers’ side] not here.” Despite Alberto’s protestations, Che starts swimming for it. It is pitch black. He’s been drinking. And he has horrible asthma that has almost killed him twice on this odyssey already. The clinicians watch in helpless horror as Ernesto disappears into the darkness of the lake. Meanwhile, the lepers on their side begin to hear the splashing of a swimmer and come out to see what it is. Eventually, they see that it is their beloved new doctor, and they begin to chant his name. “Er-nest-o! Er-nest-o! Er-nest-o! They wade out to greet him with hugs and excited splashes. (From his first day at the colony, Ernesto has shunned the “rules” about gloving up when interacting with the highly contagious patients. He has always just touched them and allowed the lepers to touch him as well…Hmm…Sound like anyone else we know from history?) I burst into tears and wept until my daughter awoke from her nap to find me sobbing on the couch.
Two movies. Two visions. Two very different approaches to life. We can only hope – and DO whatever each of us can – to see to it that Che’s prevails.
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The Living Vision Community exists to inspire and equip people to live as Jesus did.
As an experimental form of spiritual community, we attempt to fulfill our mission in an organic, non-institutional way.
(While we choose to unite around Christ-like action rather than uniform belief, those seeking a sense of our underlying principles and practices may refer to two publications:)
- The Way of Jesus: Re-Forming Spiritual Communities in a Post-Church Age,
by Toby Jones
- “The Eight Points,” by The Center for Progressive Christianity
(http://www.tcpc.org/about/8points.cfm)
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