July 12, 2009: Interconnectedness

As you may know, I usually spend my Wednesday nights at my Quaker meeting breaking bread and talking with several formerly incarcerated men, a few folks in recovery, and a handful of Quakers. Indeed, these Wednesday nights, aka “meals-and-sharing,” are central to my life and, often the highlight of my week. But when I received an invitation to watch “Crash” and discuss it with members of an East Somerville community group last Wednesday, I decided to go. Much as I love m&s, I equally love discussing race and class. This East Somerville discussion—about a movie I’d already seen—would be especially important to show up for because, I knew, much of this discussion would happen in English and Spanish.

The evening didn’t go as well as one might hope for largely because the film took almost 2 hours so that there really wasn’t adequate time for discussion. A shame. That this hurried, happened-while-people were-moving-furniture (!) conversation did happen in English and Spanish was a plus, however.

The evening’s Ah hah turned out to be not some bit o’ wisdom I heard from someone, however, but a very new way I experienced the film. The first time I saw this amazing movie, much as I loved it, the coincidence-driven plot bothered me. I mean, c’mon: haven’t we moved on since Dickens?

But since my heightened awareness of how deeply, how profoundly, everything on this planet is connected, I experienced this film as an affirmation of this inter-dependency, our (often maddening) interconnectedness.

Word.

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