Don't take life for granted

By Ruben Navarrette Jr., Special to CNN

December 4, 2009 8:28 a.m. EST

Quinton Aaron plays the role of Michael Oher and Sandra Bullock is Leigh Anne Touhy in "The Blind Side."

Editor's note: Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board, a nationally syndicated columnist and a regular contributor to CNN.com. Read his column here

San Diego, California (CNN) -- Sometimes, a film is so powerful that it haunts you long after you've left the theater. Usually, it's because of the weight of the message.

The film haunting me is "The Blind Side." And the message? I'll leave that to Leigh Anne Tuohy to explain.

Tuohy and her husband, Sean, are the subjects of the new movie, "The Blind Side." The film is an adaptation of the 2006 book, "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game" by Michael Lewis.

It tells the incredible story of Michael Oher, who went from being a homeless inner-city high school student whose father was dead and whose mother was a crack addict to a star lineman at the University of Mississippi -- eventually being selected by the Baltimore Ravens in the 2009 NFL draft. The Ravens recently signed the 6-5, 309-pound Oher to a 5-year, $13.8 million contract.

This American Dream is brought to us not just by Oher's talent, perseverance, and hard work but also by the fact that he was adopted by the Tuohys. The white, wealthy Memphis family not only fed and clothed Michael but also loved him as one of their own along with daughter Collins and son Sean Jr.

The "Blind Side" is the No. 2 film in America, and the role of Leigh Anne Tuohy is played to perfection by Sandra Bullock.

Still, some critics dismissed the film as hokey and condescending, with one calling it the latest chapter in Hollywood's "long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity."

They missed the point. Simply put, there's a lot that any one of us can do to improve the life of our fellow man. And the fact that we do it is its own reward.

"He had a much greater impact on our lives than we did on his life," Leigh Anne said in a recent interview. "You have this child, and you bring him in, and you realize how fortunate you are, how you're blessed to have family, you're blessed to have your health. So much in life you take for granted."

There's the message: So much in life you take for granted. We've forgotten how lucky we are, because we're busy cursing fate. We've stopped being grateful for what we have, because we somehow find it more satisfying to complain about what we don't. Until we meet someone who has much less than we do.

So much in life you take for granted.

As Americans, we've become victims of our own success. We've strayed so far from the example of our immigrant parents and grandparents that we bear no resemblance to that model.

Weighed down by own bloated sense of entitlement and self-importance, we've lost our appetite for competition and we prefer to talk instead about what we think we "deserve." At the first sign of adversity, we play the victim, give up, or fall apart. With all the blessings that come with living in the world's most remarkable country, still we complain. We retreat. We whine.

Here in the Golden State, thousands of students at the University of California turned out to protest a 32 percent fee increase. I wrote a column, expressing disappointment that these "brats" consider a publicized subsidized college education an entitlement and telling them to go get jobs if their education is that important to them. I heard back from many of their parents who, angrily rising to their children's defense, informed me -- in incompatible narratives -- that either there were no jobs or their kids already had two of them.

How about that? Bratty parents. Apparently, in California, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

After a few days of that noise, I was ready for a movie where, in one of the more poignant scenes, a young man is given his own bedroom and remarks that he's "never had one before." Not a room but a bed.

In another scene, Michael is so grateful to be at Thanksgiving dinner that he respectfully sits at the dining room table while the rest of the family plops down in front of the television. In another scene, he requests a driver's license just so he can have something with his name on it.

So much in life we take for granted.

I saw the movie in a well-to-do suburb north of San Diego. The crowd cheered, laughed, and cried. When it was over, there were smiles all around. I wondered: For all we've acquired, what have we lost -- and look to movies like this to replenish?

The scene about the bed made me want to run home and gather up every one of my kids' toys and give them to Goodwill. And, I tell you, the next time they ask for something they don't need, they're getting a paper route. Or at least they would if they weren't a preschooler and a toddler.

In one scene, Leigh Anne interrupts football practice to give Michael a helpful tip for a lineman -- treat the team like your family and protect the family. She tells the startled football coach: "You can thank me later."

Treat yourself to a nice present this holiday season. See this movie. You can thank me later.

The opinions expressed by this commentary are solely those of Ruben Navarrette Jr.

Another Brick in the Wall

I'll occasionally post articles that I find to be extraordinarily informative and well written. This particular piece below is by a colleague and friend of mine, Pranab Chatterjee, who is a final year Medical Student. His article is thought provoking to say the least and convicting. Enjoy this ingenious piece of writing by a gifted man who draws from his personal experiences to shine light onto a very despondent matter.

Another Brick in the Wall

Another brick in the wall, then, that’s what we are, aren’t we?

Suicide: Edouard Monet: 1877

So, just another brick has fallen out of the wall. Another snapshot in the family album has become a matter of the past, another roll number marked off the scrolls and the rosters, another family torn asunder. Another set of parents, whose lives are forever devastated. But what does it matter to us, the ones who survived? We need to go on. Move on with the stream of life and forget about the lesser beings that buckled under the pressure. We are the selected ones in the battle of existence, the chosen ones of fate, the desired ones of destiny. We should not let the ripples in life’s stream disturb our great and mighty ships of their purpose in life. We should move on within the sterile safety of the stereotyped monotony of our regimented and regularized life.

Well, they say that Anupam Datta committed suicide a couple of days ago, I say, we murdered him. I say we murdered Pritam before him and Ghanashyam even before that. And well, we won’t of course stop at that, the dark sarcasm of life is too funny for us to avoid. Our sanguinivorous appetites are yet to be sated. The hunger for more flesh, the thirst for fresh blood lies within… satisfied for the time being until the time comes for the next strike. When another brick falls off the wall, another snapshot gets its moment of glory, another life is nipped in the bud, NAY another worthless entity is wiped off the face of this earth relieving us of the burden of carrying about the weaker and we move on ahead, walk along indefatigably along the path to excellence. And the ones that fall by the wayside, why, we should kick them out and pave the path ahead with their bones, LIFE HATES LOSERS!!!!

Let me settle down, my thoughts are in a turmoil, as they have been ever since I saw the mangled remains of what was Anupam Datta… let me go back in time… not two days, but two years…

After the long and arduous struggle through high school, I made it to the best medical school of the state with another 153 fellows, few of whom, were already close friends with me. I was to come to know most of the rest of them over time, befriend them, befoe them, love them, hate them, help them, hinder them… in short, make them a part of my life… one of these fellows was a certain chubby, cheerful bloke, Ghanashyam, a long standing friend, with whom I has battled through the tough days leading into the admission into the haloed circle of Medical College, Kolkata. We carried forward the friendship even in to the medical school. Tuitions, classes, bunked classes, idle hours in library, speculations on which girl was better looking, speculations on how good, bad or ugly the subjects were… life seemed to have changed nothing even as my friend and I trod across the threshold of school and into college. As we got integrated into the intoxicating and enthralling life of Medical College, Kolkata, we became a part of each others’ life as well. And then came the first hurdle. The First Professional Exams. As I excelled and soared across the hurdle with flying colors, my friend, though not as good, managed a decent result. So blinded was I with my new-found status and position of pride and pelf, that I failed to see that my long-time friend was slipping inexorably into the dark chasms of depression. Our occasional talks reeked of gloominess and sepulchral melancholy, but I was, even then, too blind to recognize the symptoms. I dismissed them as the usual “medical student blues”, the routine rumblings of the ravaged mind stressed out under the pressure of medical school. Never ever did I dream that there was a sinister storm lurking under the apparent lull on the surface. Somewhere along the line, the chubby cheeky guy had given way to a gloomier, silent and moody fellow. We yet stayed blissfully unaware. Until, one day, when disaster struck… what followed was a three month long tug-of-war with death, which death won in the end. What was left of my chubby friend after it all was an empty shell. The wan smile that creased the corners of his lips even in death reminded me of the ghost of his self that he had become in the days preceding his lethal leap in front of a speeding train. And even as I stood in the morgue, where his post mortem was done, looking on at his disfigured body, his icteric organs, his congested lungs, his enlarged and infarcted liver and kidneys as he was disemboweled with little grace or respect by the attendants, I could not comprehend the entirety of the tragedy, a realization that was to strike me two years later, in another time and place, but eerily similar in its sinister nature.

Two years passed after that. Life was back to normal. We had assumed our own lives as though he had never existed amongst us. Except for the occasional twinge that arose when his roll number, mistakenly, got called out. Or those times when his trademark jokes or comments would pop up disconcertingly, making the atmosphere gloomier than ever. But even these distractions got to become few and far between. We were, in short, back in our struggle for existence with aplomb. But then again, life gave me another rude jolt, another shock, another reality check.

Day before yesterday, as I was sitting around doing particularly nothing constructive in the canteen besides killing very essential final year time, a call came to one of my friends’ mobile informing of the attempted suicide of one of their classmates. As one, we rushed to the head injury room in the casualty block to find a mangled and mutilated body of someone whom I hazily recognized to have advised about the usefulness of doing an ICMR project in the summer. I was not really shocked until I saw the extent of damage that his body had undergone. Having jumped in front of the Metro, he had not only sustained massive mechanical injuries but also terrible electric burns. Like a burnt piece of toast, one of his sides had been peppered and charred and one could actually smell the acrid burnt smell of clothes and flesh even over the sterile smell of the hospital that seems to benumb every other olfactory stimulus. But, death, in all its glory, mocked at the impunity of man and his weak endeavors to deny His presence. The overpowering stench of death, or should I say aroma, because it would have been unimaginably painful to live through what he had suffered, pervaded every bit of the room. The whirring air conditioners tried best, but in vain, to cleanse the air. Even as the last ditch efforts to rouse him from his final slumber were abandoned, it hit us like a bolt of thunder—we actually saw him pass off right in front of us, mocking at the uselessness of the science or art or whatever of medicine that we so religiously practice, making a joke of an entire profession, considered to be the incarnation of God on earth.

Another series of distressing activities, meeting devastated parents, arranging for yet another post mortem to be done post haste, another compellingly similar set of events as I forgot where I was—in the Medical College-Kolkata Police Morgue or the Peerless Hospital—Kaantapukur Morgue… the present indelibly merged with the past as I moved through the well-rehearsed steps of asking the officialties to be closed with perfunctory perfection. It didn’t matter a jot to me that the bloke whose mangled body was being disemboweled inside was hardly known to me, it mattered not that the guy who would become a potful of ashes had ever hardly talked to me, or that there was no better alternative than death for someone who was as badly injured as him. What mattered was he was DEAD. He had died for reasons so absolutely balderdash that one would seem to ridicule the idea had the mutilated body not been present in front of them, twisted into a shape that a human body was never meant to have assumed. What mattered was that he was one of those who fell by the wayside and we NEVER stopped in our rush towards excellence to put forward a helping hand and pull them up. What mattered was that we were as much responsible for his death as probably he was, maybe more. What mattered was that he had killed himself, solved all his transient problems with a permanent solution, but made us stand face-to-face with a number of questions. A number of doubts. And even as the unctuous and placating tones of the powers-to-be spoke to the student body present at the site, about the beauty of life and the uselessness of killing oneself, I could feel the unreal hilarity of the situation. The lip service. The promised mourning next day. The apparent show of grief. The oh-so-familiar official response to the mishap. And then, the forgetting.

What can we do? As I searched around for an answer, waking up in the middle of sweaty nightmares over the last two nights, I felt so weak, so impotent. So useless. Even as I sat on my bed, wiping sweat off my forehead after another particularly nasty nightmare, I wondered what could we do? There had to be a way out. How long do we abandon our fellow feelings, shirk our responsibilities and let people who fall down get stampeded to death by the oncoming hordes of life’s problems. What if, tomorrow, I am the one who has fallen down and desperately seeks a way out? If not for “them” I should at least do it for “us” or even maybe “me”, for if each of us could ensure that we take care of the “me”, the “us”, then the “they” could be taken care of. If we could all chip in with the small things, the bigger things, I am sure, could take care of themselves. I hit upon an idea of a support group, consisting of teachers and more so, students. Students who knew what the hardships were, who knew the value of empathy, who could be approached freely, without doubt, suspicion or fear for a little support. But where do we find such people? Where do we train them to such expertise that they may handle the situation with care and precaution? How do we motivate the behemoth of the Governmental health system into devising such a thing? How? How? How?

The questions harry me, but I have decided the course. I will approach the Principal and Dean personally and try to make them see reason and hope for the best, but whilst the serpentine lanes of governmental regimentation are satisfied, and the red tapes are cut and tied, I will try to move for making a body consisting of interested students and teachers in order to spread AWARENESS regarding this matter at large. If any of you who are reading this feel the same way I do, please do get back at me with suggestions as to what I can do to ameliorate the present situation at:

pranabchatterjee@hotmail.com

and/or

email@pranabchatterjee.co.cc

And I believe we don’t need that education which pushes us towards death and destruction and makes excellent but absolutely un-empathic practitioners of medicine (they should not be accorded the honor of being addressed as doctors) out of us.

And even as I end, the questions asked by T.S.Eliot still reverberates in my ears:

“The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.”

T. S. Eliot, The Rock, 1934