Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Midway

In the words of Stephen Clark:
[T]his is indeed a (short) film that everyone should see:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=377714522327361

http://midwayfilm.com/
The trailer, to which the second link leads, is less than four minutes long, and is incredible. It's like an exhibition of art photographs, but showing birds killed by garbage. The point, as far as I can tell from such a short preview, is about environmentalism and the need for us to throw less garbage into the sea. But if feels as though the point is somehow (even) bigger than that, as though the birds' dying is a symptom of something else, or a metaphor. Greed, laziness, sloppiness, thoughtlessness, short-term thinking, short-range thinking (here matters, there does not) lead to consequences we don't like. Lead even to what we want least of all, the poisoning of paradise. Even though we might be so dimly aware that this (paradise, unpoisoned) is what we want most of all that we don't even recognize our desire for it. (They are only birds, after all.)    

2 comments:

  1. Thanks. I find myself wondering whether the problem is more one of the consequences of our attitudes or the vice inherent in the attitudes themselves. Which perhaps is itself vicious, given that I should be resolving to change my life rather than philosophizing about it. But there seems to be something badly incoherent in the way we live, something that will perhaps never be fixed until we find some way to order our values. We don't seem to have our priorities right, in other words. Which is old news, but urgent nonetheless.

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