The other night I watched a very shocking old comedy (1940s) called "Over 21" about a married couple of successful writers in their late 30's/early 40's, devoted to their Nation and to each other. The husband was an editorial opinion writer for a successful newspaper in which he had a controlling interest and the wife wrote screenplays. In the opening scene, the husband has unexpectedly enlisted to fight in WWII, leaving his beloved paper in other's hands to go off to basic training and officer training after that. This threw the paper into a panic, as its profits were strongly tied to the husband's passionate writing detailing the meaning of current events and actions to be taken by the public to manage a beneficial response. The husband believed that he could not accurately write about the situation or the solutions unless he participated in it, so he enlisted. Yet the required investment of his time and attention would temporarily eclipse his ability to write about it. You can see why the other board members at the paper believed he was too special to be replaced. So they chased him. His wife, who concurrently postponed her career to support him, put herself directly in between her husband and the efforts of the paper to badger him into giving up and coming back to keep the paper alive. Various twists and turns lead to the wife secretly writing his column for him, repeating and elaborating on the ideas her husband has communicated to her privately between his demanding training combined with the homespun wisdom of the other wives living in base housing. Of course it all fell apart at the end and here's the shocking part. Not that the wife had accurately described her husband's solution to the best way to win lasting peace at the end of the war, but the solution itself: Our own happiness is directly tied to the happiness of every single other human being on the planet. Peace could only be had by protecting their rights as well as we protect our own. Even if you're only motivated by self interest, it is so.This basic understanding of the true nature of reality is what is missing. This is what cripples us. (Good movie. You can rent it on Amazon for $3.99.)
