Lucy

I have a note in my computer desk drawer to title my next post Sacrifice and Selfishness.  In addition to the thoughts I had percolating in my head, I was going to comment on the George Will piece I read from this past Sundays Opinion page in the Inquirer.  But after seeing the movie Lucy on Sunday night, I thought I might be able to connect my last post about the future with the movie, and Will's essay, and my original topic.  Here goes.


If you have not seen the now released movie, Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson, and if you like movies that make you think a bit, then I recommend seeing this flick.  Without giving too much away, the movie is about a young woman who is accidently exposed to a nasty drug which causes her brain activity to increase from the normal 10% to, eventually, 100%.  During that time, her enhanced brain allows her to control her body, the bodies of those around her, the electrical impulses that permeate (invisibly) our daily lives, and ultimately, time.  (For those of you that are cognizant of the history of the ape to man theory of evolution, her name Lucy in the story is no coincidence.)


For me, the key scene in the movie is when Lucy contacts a famous professor who has been active in the theory of the brain's capabilities and what those capabilities may morph to as our ability to utilize more of our brain's capacity improves/evolves.  The professor, played by Morgan Freeman, when asked by Lucy what she should do with her increased knowledge, answers that she should do what all evolving life has done for millennia; pass it on.  As Lucy knows she is dying and has less than a day in which to accumulate her knowledge in order to pass it on, it may seem surprising that she would choose such a selfless act, as opposed to the oh so many more selfish ways she could have spent her last day.


Which brings me to George Will's Sunday editorial.  Obviously, Mr Will is extremely intelligent.  On more than one occasion, I have tried to read his opinions in the Sunday Inquirer, only to give up part way through as I found them beyond my grasp.  But I made it through this particular one.  To paraphrase Will, liberals in particular and President Obama in specific, are hypocritical to blame corporations for moving their jobs and money overseas when the labor and tax rates of those countries are more friendly to their profits.  Hypocritical because, in Will's opinion, it is liberals and democrats who support labor unions and create the tax laws.  Will points out that since corporations only concern is shareholders, and shareholders only concern is profit and dividends, then, of course those companies will more their businesses and their money to more favorable environments.  Of course, Will does not choose to explain why, given the sad state of the corporate world,profits, CEO pay and the stock market are at all time highs.  Are they not indicators of a favorable environment?  He also avoids discussion of why he assumes 0% corporate tax would do anything more than improve corporate bottom lines just as the reduction of corporate taxes over the past 30 years have done.  It seems clear that as long as the only yardstick of corporate success is profit, then labor rates (and for that matter, consumer safety), will always trail far behind.  I give him credit for sticking with his love of trickle down economics, despite the facts that show that very little trickles down.  I can only conclude that should a corporate CEO had gained Lucy's powers, only the corporation would have benefitted from them, not the United States, or the human race.


There in lies the problem.  The future, should it continue to be driven by a Supreme Court that believes corporations are people, should it continue to be controlled by the belief that money and wealth are the only goals that matter, should its leaders and citizens continue to believe that the haves earned what they have and the have nots are lazy, or worse, not loved by god, then the idea that in one's last days, we should consider what we can contribute will be permanently replaced by the idea of what we can take before we go.


Sacrifice and Selfishness.


Fortunately, I don't believe that the majority of people are selfish.  Daily, we read about and can witness the lives of parents who work a 2nd job to send their kids to college, neighbors who check on the elderly on their block when the weather turns nasty, teachers who supply books and pencils to their students when the school district is unable, and all the millions of volunteers who build houses, plant gardens, serve lunches, and donate goods and services and time to those in need.  Acts of sacrifice are all around us, just as prevalent as the horrible acts, just not as news worthy.  (I could inject here that since so much of our media is controlled by large corporations, perhaps that is why bad news rules the day, but I will resist the thought).


In the movie, as her brain's capacity moves closer to 100%, Lucy teams up with a police officer, not because she needs the backup, but so she is reminded of her connection to humanity.  One might say that at the end, despite her astonishing mental abilities, she was also far more humane, even spiritual, in that she sacrificed her life to provide knowledge to those that remained.  She chose a path which she believed would improve the human race, not one in which she could take advantage of those with less brain capacity.   Let's hope that there will come a day when George Will and those that defend the corporate philosophy that is so well summed up in the phrase, "it is business, not personal", will gain the brain capacity to realize that being human is always personal.  Anything less is not worth defending.