Mooning

Last night, I finally got myself to the movie, Under the Same Moon. I knew that it was going to be an emotional roller coaster, but I was sure that there would be a happy ending.

But, this movie really is at least a 5 hankie movie.

You don't get five minutes into the film before your heart strings are being seriously tugged.

I say that to let folks who are feeling overly emotional (and not too good about that fact) right now should be aware of what they would be getting into with this movie.

I will honestly admit that I was afraid that it would be overly sentimental and melodramatic. But after seeing the movie, I feel that though there were some overly done themes, the majority of the movie centers on the real life struggles of immigrants, documented and undocumented, and the lessons people can learn from hardship.

Some crises are settled unrealistically, but most are avoided through the intervention of everyday angels.

If nothing else, this movie is a revelation for highlighting the existence of these everyday angels.

These are regular people, some are the kind we would label "nice" and others are definitively not, who see another in danger or pain, and act, not out of self interest and sometimes without regard to their own self interest.

Life is truly full of these people, but we choose not to see them or their actions. When we are forced by extraordinary circumstances to really see these people, then we spend a lot of time looking for their faults. Those are easy to find because people are not perfect. We revel in the awful, check your local online newspaper for the most viewed and most emailed stories. Of the top ten, at least 7 of them will be stories about murders, crashes, and other horrible events. The stories about triumphs, small or large, are few and far between and tend not to get the same kind of readership.

Seeing this movie, and being pleasantly surprised by the message, was coming full circle for me today because I woke up to Julio Diaz's story on Morning Edition. It is the story about how he deals with being accosted by a teen with a knife; he recorded it at StoryCorps a few days later and they titled it: "A Victim Treats his Mugger Right". I suggest you take a listen or read the page, it gives most of the story.

Here are my two favorite parts:

"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says. As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."
...
"I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It's as simple as it gets in this complicated world."