Third Entry

 

I thought that this movie dealt greatly with some of the ideas of this course in memorable ways. The first idea that comes to me is the idea of ripple effects. One person, in this case an elementary student, performed three selfless acts to help other people and no expectation of a reward. The student fed and sheltered a homeless person. In turn, he helped a woman who was about to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. This lady later helped a young man evade police capture after stealing a boom box from a store. He in turn helped the daughter of the man who gave the journalist a new car. All of this started from one small act of giving a person some food and shelter for the night, creating effects that nobody would have even dreamed of! This created a pyramid scheme of goodwill that created good in the lives of these people. This idea is important to people who are losing hope in their cause or energy to continue to stand up for what they believe in. It may seem hopeless at the time but further down the road, it is impossible to predict how those actions in the past will shape the next step of the future. It can gain new attention to the cause, giving it momentum or even in some cases support from outside of the community. The actions can even inspire somebody outside of the initial cause to take action and become engaged in something else they are passionate about, creating change and rippling out in new directions, having the same inspiring effects elsewhere.
The other theme is just simply thinking about more than yourself. It may not be a direct message, but I think that this movie showed that true progress that has impact must come from people who aren’t trying to make things better for just themselves. It has to be about helping, and improving the lives of the other people around them. I think that this is something that is slowly being lost in our generation. I can see how many people have deemed us “The Lost Generation”. We seem to only be concerned about the short term comforts such as who updated facebook five seconds ago. We have to have college classes, such as Colloquium, to teach students what lives in the nature around us because we never spent a lot of time outdoors as children, but rather indoors with our gaming systems. We need to change this and prove that we aren’t an embarrassment historians are going to have to explain one day.

 They will have fun trying to explain this anyways.