Not Meant for You

My wife and I went to see the Anthony Hopkins movie, One Life. It tells the story of an English man, Nicholas Winton, who helped children escape Czechoslovakia after the Nazis annexed Sudetenland and before invaded proper. The story is well told, through the experiences of Winton in later life, flashing back to the past. It is slow-paced, there is no gore, no traumatic scenes, yet the sense of loss is conveyed.

Life is hard.

Do you ever think what you would do, if you were going through the experiences that are depicted in the movies? What it would be like to send a child away with strangers in attempt to keep them safe, or live in a concentration camp, or in an attic for few years. I think that in our mind we feel that we would cope better than we actually would have, especially now.

Reading Roald Dahl's boy to Smallsteps, it gives some insight into a different time, as it tells of his life when he was young. His slightly older sister died at seven, his father died a few months after, his mother was left with six children to take care of, two of them from her recently passed husband's prior marriage, where his wife had died in childbirth of the second child.

Yet, she went on.

This has raised a lot of questions in Smallsteps as to what life was like, as well as how her own life is so different in many ways, yet there are still familiarities. It is a hundred years apart, but while there are similarities like riding bikes and playing with friends, there are also some alarming points, like getting hit across the palms or the buttocks with a cane. She can't believe that this would actually happen.

Yet I wonder, how much of the culture allowed people to have a resiliency to the horrors that they were to face in the world in which they lived. And now, we are teaching kids to live in a world under an assumption that there are only going to be good times, that the worst that can happen is that their favorite show gets cancelled, or the boy band they like breaks up.

This is going to depend on localization.

The other day, someone mentioned how what happens in Finland is so different to where they live, and this is something everyone should remember. That we can only really have direct experience with what we experience directly - watching a film doesn't give too much insight into how a situation truly was, or how we would react in similar circumstances. And, even when we are experiencing directly, our understanding is going to depend on a lot of factors too.

But, we have a global view of the world now, which makes us think that we know what is going on and that it gives us real insight into the way it actually is. But, it is like a film about a concentration camp experience, it can't truly capture the moment. Nor can walking through a concentration camp like Auschwitz today, because as impactful as it is, it is only a slice of the horror. A slice that is only felt emotionally, through empathetic feelings under the assumption that those feelings are adequate.

Is life hard?

For some, it certainly is. But, everything is relative, so "hard" depends on what has already been experienced. Meaning that most people in the western world today, no matter what kinds of complaints they have about the cost of living, or not being able to afford to buy a house, or the importance of having representative signage on toilet doors, is unlikely to move the scale much in terms of what is a hard life in the past.

I don't know hunger.

I have been hungry, but I have never truly known hunger like my father did as a child growing up in an occupied region in war-torn Malaysia. I know what it is like to lose a good friend, but I don't know what it is like to see my best friend beheaded in the town square at the age of seven.

And as horrible as it was, perhaps the Long Peace was so long, because enough people remembered the horrors of wartime, and they could still feel it in their bones. Nowadays, both the people in power and the people who vote for them, don't really know what it is like to be at war in the same sense as it was back then - up close and personal. And for the younger voters, they have never even been smacked.

I wonder how much impact it has on culture?

And then, considering that we are now able to see the cultures from all around the world, interact and share our ideals, maybe one of the problems is that the more removed western cultures tend to have the most influence in the global narrative, from the government level, all the way through to the individual social media creators. But, maybe it doesn't translate.

Like, I know that I probably spend more in a a day or two than some people spend in a month, but it isn't because I am rich. Every location has different expenses as well as prices, so when I say "$100" dollars, what that buys at the local level can be starkly different. But, as I can only speak from my own experience, there is no point trying to be "inclusive" for everyone, meaning that they are going to have to translate it into their own situation - localize it.

These days, people seem to have this expectation that everything they come across, every piece of content, every suggestion, has to include them and be applicable to them - even if it was never created with them in mind. Perhaps it comes down to the self-centered nature of the internet, or perhaps it is for some other reason, but assuming that everything is provided personally with you in mind, is going to lead to a lot of misses.

However, even if things aren't meant for us and even if we don't experience them directly, it doesn't mean we can't learn something from them, translate them into the form we need it, and apply it to improve our one life at the local level.

Or the many lives of others.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]