If you’ve spent any amount of time reading my stuff here at MovieFixation, you may have noticed that I’m terminally online. I realize I should be sort of embarrassed by that, but I’m not, like at all.
I watch people, trends, Tiny Desk performances, independent journalists, legacy news shows, mega TikTok creators, Oscar-winning directors, some kid with a camera no one knows. I consume it all, and I dissect it for patterns. Lately the pattern has been all doom and gloom.
Accidentally catch too much of the nightly news and now you feel like slipping yourself into a coma for the next ten years? Maybe an 8-dollar coffee will help. No? Don’t worry, just scroll until you find someone cosplaying as a billionaire, selling you a lifestyle you will never attain. Well, maybe you will, maybe, after one more YSL bag.
Instead of looking for something to buy to fill the hole that American Political Despair™ created in my chest, I started looking for evidence of action. I started doing what Mr. Rogers told us to do all those years ago: look for the helpers.
First, there was the lady who kept getting arrested but refused to stop providing food to her local homeless community. I see the folks who walk women into and out of Planned Parenthood so they don’t walk alone through that cloud of religious shaming on their way to get medical care. Once I started looking, there were myriad examples. Life is, terrifyingly enough, quite similar to a social media algorithm. In every example, a member of a community was reaching out to another. It was people standing shoulder to shoulder—every time.
Small acts of resistance will spark hope, and hope spreads like wildfire. Once you’ve got a cloud of hope, revolution is sure to emerge. That is literally how it plays out in every movie I have ever seen. And as you know, I’ve seen quite a few.
I may not be able to predict the future, but all that pattern recognition makes me really good at selecting the fastest route.