Values

We watched the Jimmy Stewart classic It's a Wonderful Life over the weekend.  I hadn't actually watched the old Capra Christmas classic for quite some time, but like all really good art even a "timeless classic" like Wonderful Life, can live and breathe.  The thing that got me thinking this time around was the villain, Mr. Potter, a rich, greedy old man with dreams of complete hegemony over the town of Bedford Falls.  He is parsimonious, mean and power-hungry, pretty much the perfect foil to Stewart's George Bailey. Bailey throughout his life gives of himself, puts his own interests on the back burner for the sake of others and generally stands as a moral barrier to Potter.
In the post war optimism of 1946 Potter was an obvious, absurdly two dimensional villain.  No one in Roosevelt's America would have seen him as a good leader or even a decent human being. Early in the movie he engages in bellicose rants about how the little bank run by Bailey's father and later by Bailey himself, would too often give loans out too easily, how they were not profitable, about how they were giving money away to people who didn't deserve it.  In 2018, I realized that not only have we changed our opinion about whether Mr. Potter is a villain, we have elected him to high offices, and no, I'm not just talking about Trump.  He is every politician who preys upon selfishness and fear of someone, "getting one over on the taxpayer."  He is the fear of migrant workers and the warning about socialists leading us into becoming Venezuela.  Granted, I was not alive in 1946, and so I only know about Roosevelt's America from books and movies, but I want to believe in an America that holds George Bailey as a paradigm not Mr. Potter.
This morning I was watching ESPN as I drank my coffee, and one of those tear-jerking commercials for the V-Foundation came on.  The V-Foundation is named for Jim Valvano, a basketball coach at North Carolina State who battled and died of cancer.  If you haven't heard or seen his acceptance of the Arthur Ashe award do yourself a favor and watch:

That's Jimmy V.  He's a George Bailey and he has, even after losing his battle against cancer, continued to fight it through his foundation for cancer research.  But what struck me this morning is how utterly horrible it is that people have to beg for charity in order to fund cancer research.  Cancer research should be a thing that we, as a society, should devote ourselves to with our whole heart and mind and soul, regardless of whether or not it is profitable. It is, like other health care activities, a moral obligation for people who aspire to care for others.  Whether you define that as a religious commitment or not, it is the kind of thing we need to accomplish as a species if we ever hope to move beyond our limitations as mere animals.
See also, the pictures that came to us over the weekend of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers with children in diapers, fleeing from tear gas grenades fired by us at the southern border.  Welcoming those who are in need of asylum from the brutality and poverty of their former home is not just a "nice" thing to do, it's probably not an "easy" thing to do, but it is the moral thing to do, and no amount of equivocation or rhetorical gymnastics will ever make what is happening at our southern border anything but a repudiation of the better angels of our nation. Certain utilitarian arguments for doing the right thing do exist, we need immigration in order to remain vital, because we're not making enough babies, and we are not creating a work force that will do the very necessary jobs in our society, but even if there was no profit in it, taking in those barefoot and homeless babies and their desperate mothers would be the right thing to do.
Don't ever forget what the right thing to do is, and never forget that it is often not the same thing as the profitable thing to do.  Millions of Americans love Jimmy Stewart, and It's a Wonderful Life, not just because it's a touching Christmas movie, but because it presents for us a vision that one man, making choices for the greater good rather than out of his own selfishness, can really make a difference.  Sometimes Mr. Potter seems inevitable, and George Bailey can be driven to wonder if it's all worth it, maybe even to the point where he's ready to give it all up.  I feel like, as a nation, we may be at one of those "bridge" moments.  Maybe the drastic challenges of immigration, climate change, globalization, and even cancer and other diseases, are just our stupid guardian angels jumping into the river daring us to save them.