Not a Movie Critique

The Island caught my attention when it first came out in theaters, but I am not avid movie-goer, thus I never made an effort to see it. However, with oodles of time to kill while on vacation, my brother and I watched the movie on Pay-per-view yesterday. I love action movies, so the fast paced, choppy cinematography captured my attention to the extent that I wouldn’t get up to go to the bathroom until my brother used the TiVo’s pause which I didn’t know that we had.

The Island, directed by Michael Bay and starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johanssen, was much more than an action movie after I thought about some of the prominent quotes. It explored the ugliest and most beautiful aspects of humanity: Greed and Curiosity. (You thought that I would say Love, didn’t you?)

Greed manifested itself in the corporation which bred human clones in order to reap a huge profit and in the upper class who bought the human beings as their personal organ donors. While greed fueled the exploitation of these unique human beings, it also created, inadvertently, an amazing leap in the understanding of human behavior. When one of the scientists in the movie first discovers the development in McGregor’s character’s brain scans, he stutters for a moment and finally spits out, “It’s beautiful.” They recognize the complication as the development of human curiosity, which in the end destroys the entire operation and sets the truth free.

However, this post is not really about a discussion about the qualities of the movie. The Island and its exploration of the beauty of human curiosity served as my creative muse for an inspirational story of a young man in Africa. His name is William Kamkwamba and he lives in Malawi. This amazing 19 year old built a wind turbine (windmill) for his home and village using only a book on electricity, a 9th grade education, materials found dumped around the area, and his human curiosity. He can power electricity in his house and provide the village with electricity to charge various items.

I found the story of William Kamkwamba from the blog Heliotropic (a great blog about renewable electricity which I will most likely blog about in a different post as I feel it is a very important area of research and implementation). Carl Lenox, the creator of Heliotropic, wrote about the usefulness of Kamkwamba’s windmill.

“It is truly appropriate technology; if (when) the windmill breaks, he will readily be able to fix it, because he built it himself and the parts are readily available in his community. No need to parachute in expensive parts or specialists from Europe, the US, or even the capital city. . . It's the very definition of appropriate technology.”

I love the point which Lenox makes. Kamkwamba is not dependent on the major corporations and nations which exploit the people of smaller countries. (Notice a trend?) I hope that Kamkwamba continues on this same vein in his future exploits.

Elissa Baxter of The Sydney Morning Herald wrote an article spreading the news of Kamkwamba’s achievement. (I found the link to the article on Kamkwamba’s blog which he has had for about a month. Check him out here.) In it, Baxter speaks about the new generation which Kamkwamba is a part of:

“A fellow African blogger and new friend of Kamkwamba, Soyapi Mumba, described his first impression of Kamkwamba: ‘What I like about William is that he didn't join the multitude of people just blaming government or policy makers for his lack of education. Neither did he point fingers at statutory corporations for the lack of electricity in his home. He didn't just sit down and blame his parents for all this, either.’. . . Andrew Heavens, a journalist based in Khartoum, Sudan, says Kamkwamba belongs to the ‘cheetah’ generation of Africans who are not going to wait for government and aid organisations to do things for them.”

William Kamkwamba inspires me. Not to build a windmill outside of my house, but he inspires me to expand my curiosity and to care about the world around me. I already am looking into possible recycling programs to begin implementing at my university and I am currently learning the language Farsi and will start Japanese in the fall.

Whether my ambitions are inspirational or not, I encourage you to begin to expand your own curiosity with and care for the world around you. I want to be an American part of this new “cheetah” generation. Care to join?

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

“Wonderfully surreal . . . Heartbreaking and inspiring . . . It is hard to think of anyone who would not be moved and delighted by this book.” – Financial Times (London)

Indeed, I was. I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon in four hours on the drive from Florida to North Carolina. (Actually, I still have at least four more hours until we reach NC, as I am writing this post on the way there right now.)

The main character of the story, named Christopher, is a 15 year old boy who has autism and sets off to find the killer of his neighbor’s dog. He is reminiscent of a British version of Adrian Monk, the obsessive compulsive detective from the television show “Monk” on USA. Christopher takes on the role of Sherlock Holmes, switches to Steven Hawking on frequent tangents (a personal favorite as I love physics so much), and all the while remains an autistic child trying to make his way through a world frustratingly ignorant to his special intelligence. Christopher does not have the capacity to lie and lives his life by logic. While some of his decisions seem illogical to the average reader at first, after an explanation by Christopher, the reader can see how according to the dimensions of his life, they make perfect sense. This one aspect of Christopher’s life demonstrates Haddon’s exquisite talent as a writer. You feel as if you are really inside an autistic child’s mind, as if Christopher himself is truly writing the story.

The Daily News writes about the novel, “A lovely piece . . . [Haddon] illuminates a core of suffering through the narrowly focused insights of a boy who hasn’t the words to describe emotional pain.” As Christopher searches for the truth of the death of Wellington the dog, he comes across the truth of an important discovery in his own life. (I am not a plot spoiler, so you need to read the book yourself.) The reader watches as he deals with the implications of this change through his limited expression of emotion and change. My heart wrenched at many different points of the story, but not for the “disability” that he lives with, but with man’s inhumanity to man. I learned a great deal about the opposite perspective in situations such as those which Christopher encounters and writhed in anger at how so many of the characters dismissed him as mentally challenged and treated him with contempt.

This story touched me not only emotionally, but also morally as I examined my own treatment of those around me. I thought of two autistic children at my church and my impatience with them at times. I do not think that they realize my impatience, but I see it in myself and after reading The Curious Incident, I recognize my deficiency and what continued practice may develop it into, for “practice makes perfect.” As I pondered on this arena of perfection, I also contemplated how this impatience extends beyond those “mentally challenged” to simply everyone around me and my mind shot back to “man’s inhumanity to man.”

I think that we all forget that we deal with human beings and that each person’s mind is a mystery to our own. Entertainment Weekly writes, “Haddon’s book illuminates the way one mind works so precisely, so humanely, that it reads like both an acutely observed case study and an artful exploration of a different ‘mystery’: the thoughts and feelings we share even with those very different from us.”

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The Philosophy of Comics

I came across this cartoon on a website for religious tolerance. One of the webmasters "mused" and wrote a short piece following the cartoon:

"Imagine the results if more people in the world realized the simple fact that there are over 11,000 religions in the world and that it is impossible with our present knowledge to find out which is the "true" one. An inevitable corollary to this belief would be that they would develop a degree of doubt that their religion is the only "true" one. People might be less inclined to oppress, discriminate against, murder or commit mass murder and genocide against people of other faiths such as has happened during the past decade in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Cyprus, Nigeria, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Indonesia, the U.S. etc.

Imagine the results if more people accepted their religion as the best faith for them, but at the same time recognized that there are other religions which teach about other deities, other systems of morality, other religious practices, etc. Yet almost all of them motivate people to lead better lives. There might be fewer people willing to defend their particular religion by oppressing or killing followers of other religions and spiritual paths." *

An interesting proposition, indeed.

However, I believe that this question, when asked seriously to oneself, can be a method of destruction in and of itself. Perhaps wars may not be fought on the outside with others, but an inner battle resulting in a genocide of the soul may take place. But as to quote an earlier post of mine, will it "issue [solely] destruction or initiate new growth and life?"

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*http://www.religioustolerance.org/reltrue.htm