When I go to the movies these days and sit through the previews–which start when the feature is supposed to start and run a full fifteen minutes–I despair.  Sometimes it is necessary for me to cover my ears to avoid the noise of the car crashes, the gun fire, the exploding bombs, cities, or planets.  I think to myself, “Why do the producers make all this crap, and for so much money?”  Film is a powerful and potential redemptive medium, and there are a multitude of fine filmmakers working these days.  Why do producers, then, give us heroes like the Prince of Persia and Robin Hood? 

An antidote to the tripe emanating out of Hollywood these days is the powerful and authentic film “Winter’s Bone.”  It is the story of a 17-year-old mountain girl/woman who fights to keep the family home after her father disappears, having put up the home and land as bond for his court appearance.  Ree, the 17-year-old heroine, played magnificently by Jennifer Lawrence, is an authentic, real-life heroine, not a hero gussied up with warrior duds and fancy fighting gear.  No, all she has is a squirrel rifle, and she uses that to hunt squirrels so her family can eat.  Ree is the genuine article: she is courageous, even when her life is endangered; she is tenacious, when most would have given up long ago;  she is fiercely loyal to those she loves; she stands in the truth and no other place; and she is steadfast in parenting her younger brother and sister, putting aside her own needs to care for them.

The film is set in the Missouri Ozarks, and the aesthetic chosen by director Debra Granik is a spare as the land itself.  There are no wasted words in this film.  Much is said by suggestion: by a turn of the lip, by a grunt or a glance.  The camera shows the junk cars and discarded sofas as well as the beauty of the land, the peace as well as the poverty.  The characters who people this film are authentic mountain people: they have survived this far by clan loyalty and by a physical and emotional toughness that most of us can’t begin to understand.  They will look evil in the eye, and they will kill when they have to.  You don’t want to cross them.  Some of the cast members are local people, but the main characters are actors.  John Hawkes is chilling and complex as Teardrop, Ree’s uncle.  The mountain wives know the rules of engagement, and are the ultimate peacekeepers of the community.  When I left the theater, I felt I knew all of these characters.

Compared to most Hollywood films, “Winter’s Bone” was made for chump change–$2,000,000, and supported by tax incentives from the state of Missouri–and it received the best-picture award at the Sundance Film Festival.  It is a redemptive film in the sense that it tells the truth about a people living in extremis, and because the film cuts to the core, and so sharply, we learn more about ourselves–we who have been protected from this depth of knowing by our comparative ease and ignorance.  And it is redemptive because it shows us a heroine who never gives up on what is hers to do.  She finds the truth, and sure enough, it sets her free.

P.S.  A Note to Hollywood Producers: I hate to moralize so blatantly, but if you Hollywood producers had half the integrity of Ree, you would ask yourselves if you really want to keep shoveling this monumentally expensive trash out to the American people and calling it entertainment.  (Apologies to the few good films you manage to get out to the public.)  Life is so much more than making money.  Life is so much more than making money.  Lest you miss my sentiment: Life is so much more than making money. 

Sometimes people say things to a stranger that they wouldn’t tell their best friend.  Like the man who was my seatmate on an airplane recently who was telling me about his wife’s death.  “I miss her terribly,” he said.  And then he paused and added, “But I have to confess I’m glad it was her and not me.”

Well, of course.  Such a statement, while not conventional, should not surprising.  We are animal creatures and as such are first and foremost concerned about our own survival.  People sometimes give their lives to further a cause or to protect another, but our natural and wholly understandable tendency is to think “I’m glad it’s not me.”  I’m glad it’s not me who was just diagnosed with cancer, or who lost their job, or whose house was taken by the bank.  It’s not me whose child is doing drugs.  It’s not me whose husband ran off with his secretary.  It’s not me who is standing on the street corner, ragged and hungry.  Thank God, it’s not me.

But what if we began to understand that it could be us and that in fact one day it will be us.  Maybe the specifics of another’s loss will not be our loss–maybe we will not lose a child to an improvised bomb in Iraq, for example–but if we live long enough, and we have the capacity to love, we will be struck with terrible loss and grief.  People we love will die; careers will come to an end, some prematurely; disease will strike; the ravages of age will not pass us by.

So how is it that we prepare ourselves for these eventualities?  I think practicing empathy might be a spiritual discipline worthy of our attention.  When pain or tragedy comes to another, perhaps instead of breathing a sigh of relief and turning away, we might take a moment to try and “feel with” this other person and to invite compassion.  Not only would this practice deepen us spiritually and prepare us for life’s inevitable losses, but we would develop the understanding that we are not separate and apart from others, that we are in fact one.  It is an illusion to believe that we can separate ourselves from the pain of the world. 

But if we develop this kind of empathy, will we then travel our days sad and grief-stricken?  No, not at all.  To begin his spiritual awakening, the Buddha observed poverty and illness and aging for the first time.  To take in the realities of our existence–to own the fact that we are vulnerable and that we will one day die–requires great courage.  And yet to go there is ultimately freeing.  In a way, you might say our expectations have been considerably lowered, and we can let go of a lot of  anxiety–the unacknowledged fear that has been damping down our days.

Have you ever wondered why the Dalai Lama smiles so much?  I heard him speak a few years back when he visited Portland, and in the Q & A, someone asked, “What do you do for fun?”  He answered, “Jokes!”  This is someone whose country was ravaged by a foreign power, and most of its leaders, including many of its monks, killed.  The Dalai Lama travels the world as a religious leader, and he is a spokesperson for Tibet, of course.  But he has a kind of radical acceptance of life precisely as it is, and so joy does not escape him. 

It’s that spiritual paradox that’s so hard to understand, but that is the ground of all spiritual health: we have to lose our life to find it.

I learned something rather shocking recently from a post by Elisabeth Rosenthal to nytimes.com/green.  Rosenthal told of an article published last Sunday in The Guardian of London, in which John Vidal, the paper’s environmental editor, recalled a visit to the Niger Delta a few years back, where he literally swam in “pools of light Nigerian crude.”  Apparently, decrepit pipes and oil extraction equipment in the area have caused serious leaks and spills for quite some time: “More oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico,” writes Vidal.

We Americans just don’t hear about these kinds of environmental tragedies “over there.”  After all, Nigeria is far from our thoughts, not really relevant to our lives.  Most of us really don’t even know where it is.  But the fact is according to the Vidal article, the Niger Delta supplies 40 percent of all of the crude oil imported by the United States.  Companies sucking that oil out of the ground include BP, Shell, and Exxon. 

Rosenthal makes the point that people in the United States are outraged at BP’s carelessness and indifference to our precious environmental resources in the Gulf of Mexico, but shouldn’t we be equally concerned about the behavior of oil companies in developing countries, where our oil comes from?  Ben Ikari, a member of the Ogoni people, was quoted by Vidal: “If this gulf accident had happened in Nigeria, neither the government nor the company would have paid much attention.  This kind of spill happens all the time in the delta.”

As the oil from the Deepwater spill flows hundreds and hundreds of miles from its source, killing creatures, ruining fisheries and destroying wetlands, we realize once again that we live in one small world, and that what affects one affects us all.  It follows, then, if we drive a car or use plastics, we need to be concerned with oil spills in the Niger Delta.  It’s never “those people” or “over there”–it’s always us. 

Let me begin by saying that I basically like and trust the police.  I have called on them more than once, and they have never failed to be friendly and helpful.  Of course, I’m white.  I don’t “wear a hoodie in warm weather” and I hardly ever cross three lanes of traffic without signaling, as did Keaton Otis, 25, on the fateful day of May 12, when he was stopped by the police.  According to police, Otis shouted profanities at them, claiming that he was stopped because he was black.  In fact, the initial reason for the stop, according to Portland Officer Ryan Foote, was that the driver “kind of looked  like he could be a gangster.”

When Otis, who suffers from mental illness, refused to get out of his car, three police officer tasered him at once.  After all, he refused to obey their order.  Is this a reason to tasor someone?  Tasoring is supposed to subdue the one receiving the pain, but this young man was enraged instead, and made a move for a gun, to defend himself.  Not the right thing to do–but a response that was all too understandable, considering the situation.  Otis shot Officer Burley in the leg, and he was then shot 23 times by three police officers, making this the third fatal police shooting this year.

What criteria do we use to evaluate police behavior in these fatal shootings?  In each incident, various reasons are given for police action leading to the death of the suspect.  And it’s difficult to blame a police officer who knows that his own life is on the line when he chooses this career.  But there is one criterion that we can use to judge all three of the shootings, and that is called “the test of result.”  In other words, is this the result we wanted?  Is this the only result possible?  I would give an emphatic “no” to both of those questions. 

The Mayor and the new Chief of Police, Mike Reese, need to take a hard look at police training, and they need to do so immediately, before more lives are lost unnecessarily.  I would maintain the following:  (1) the police do not need to tasor a suspect because he doesn’t obey an order.  In this case, they had his car surrounded by their cars.  Why tasor him?  (2) the police had no plan when they decided to remove Otis from the car, resulting in the tasoring, the shooting, and in fact crossfire that could have proved fatal to Office Pat Murphy; (3) the police have consistently shown that they have had no training in how to deal with people who are mentally ill–in some earlier cases, individuals have been shot simply for being mentally ill and not obeying orders; (4) stopping Keaton Otis was an obvious case of racial profiling, which is still going on in this city.

I am asking those in charge of our police to take steps so that I won’t open the Oregonian and discover that another individual has been shot to death, when an alternative approach could have saved a life.  Life is not cheap, ever.  A life should not be taken just because police orders are not instantly obeyed.  Let’s find a better way.

I recently heard a story on BBC about the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion.  It consisted of a long monologue by one of the survivors of the explosion.  I was driving at the time, and emotionally taken over by what I heard.  In the first place, the man who spoke was speaking with my accent–not just any Southern accent, because accents differ from region to region, but my own voice patterns from Louisiana.  He used expressions that I haven’t heard for a long time, like, “We commenced to move toward . . . .”  He said the flames from the explosion were four stories high.  Several times he said, “It was like looking into hell.”  He described the panic as men went for the lifeboats and as some jumped into the sea, to avoid being burned alive.  Eleven of his work mates died that day, their bodies never found. 

The explosion occurred on April 20, over a month ago, and vast amounts of oil continue to spew out of the well, shutting down fishing over 46,000 square miles of ocean and coating fragile wetlands and marshes with globs of oil.  An environmentalist from Portland is going down to help save some of the birds that have been coated with oil. 

How could such an explosion happen?  Who is to blame?

I will not try to navigate the technical reasons for the explosion, but let’s look at the political, for that is where the real blame lies.

I give as evidence the following observations:

–the Minerals Management Service is a U.S. government agency thought by many to be among the most dysfunctional agencies that exist.  Some employees (literally) were in bed with big oil representatives, took lavish presents, and even let some companies fill out their own inspection reports.  Question: Why was an agency with such significant responsibilities allowed to degenerate to this point?

–In 2005 the Energy Policy Act was passed by Congress.  The chair of the committee was Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, a friend of big oil.  The Act provided for billions of dollars in tax and royalty relief, to stimulate drilling for oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico and other offshore sites.  At the time, oil company profits were setting records.  Ever since the Reagan presidency, the government has been aggressively issuing offshore drilling permits and has given the oil industry tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks.  Question: Why does the oil industry need government subsidies?

–In 2007 the national laboratory headed by scientist Steven Chu received most of a $500 million grant from BP to develop alternative energy sources through a new entity called Energy Biosciences Institute.  Dr. Chu received the grant from Steven E. Koonin, a physicist quite close to Chu.  Now Dr. Chu serves as Obama’s energy secretary, and Dr. Koonin followed Dr. Chu to Washington and became the under secretary of energy for science. The White House seems helpless in the light of the oil spill and issued a statement Tuesday that the Energy Department “doesn’t have jurisdiction over the oil spill.”  Question:  Can anyone doubt that oil corporations because of their cozy relationships with government have inordinate influence in government policy? 

–As for BP itself, let’s take a look at the record.  On March 23, 2005, explosions and fires at a Texas City refinery run by BP caused 15 deaths and 180 injuries.  Investigators called it “one of the worst industrial disasters in recent U.S. history.”  The board found “organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation.”  Further, in 2007 BP agreed to pay around $373 million in fines and restitution  for the Texas explosion, for leaks of crude oil in Alaska, and for fraud for conspiring to corner the market on the price of propane gas.  Question:  Given BP’s abominable record, why did our government not only give this company permission to drill at such dangerous levels and also give them a waiver, so they could avoid giving a detailed report on the effect of their operations on the immediate environment?

–Investigators have noted that there were red flags indicating the possibility of an impending blowout 24 hours before the rig explosion occurred.  There were several pressure readings indicating that gas was leaking into the well, a very serious indicator of trouble.  And there were other critical decisions, like replacing heavy mud in the pipe with seawater, a move which increased the risk of explosion.  Question:  Is anyone surprised, given BP’s record, that the company pushed ahead, despite obvious risks?

So how cheap are the lives of the men who do the dirty and dangerous work of getting our oil out of the ground?  What price our fisheries and wetlands?  How much do we care about the living creatures that are destroyed?  The health hazards?  The beaches? 

To the President and to Congress:  There will always be greedy, careless people in this world, and some of them will gain a good deal of power.  It is your job as our elected officials to protect us citizens and our fragile earth from the likes of them.  In regard to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, you have failed us, failed us drastically.  Have you learned from this tragedy, or will there be more of the same?