crash

*if you haven't watched the movie crash, this is a spoiler!! and you prolly won't understand anyways.* =P

haha, i'm currently typing this in college during my break. anna's gonna kill me if i don't go makan with them soon. =P hahah, anyways, i really had so many thoughts in my head watching crash and something i learnt from habitudes during leaders meeting is that sometimes, it's more important to say what you have to say that to hear others opinion about it kinda thing. it was kinda funny listening to my classmates opinions after the movie cause of how different i felt about it. everything seemed so orderly after our discussion when usually my thoughts are very jumbled and instinctive. anyways i thought it was a really really good show. definitely worth a watch.

I remember thinking so strongly that there is good in every bad person. Like when the bad police guy molested the girl but saved her life afterwards. it was really amazing to that there is a moral responsibility in each of us, despite how bad we started out as. and even though it was obvious he was capable of bad things, he still had a heart that values life and loves his father. i used to think that people could be so easily classified as good or bad when i guess i realized that you can't always do that. the line between those two are blur and it shows that you can't just take the average acts of what people do and determine if they are a good person or a bad person. maybe it is the sum of all those acts that make up what kind of person we become. i just find it amazing that even in the worst of the worst kind of people, there is still goodness, there is still love and there is still a heart in there. like anthony and the people who got trafficked. they very nearly wanted to leave the chinese guy for dead on the road when they hit him. but at the end he chooses the free the trafficked people and it's just wow again you know? i love all these questions about human nature and ethics and yea.. maybe a really important role to play in life is to be someone who can bring out that best in other people.

i also liked the theme of how everyone's just looking for a safe place in a safe world. like how terrence howard got pushed around to survive. it makes you wonder really, if it's worth it? sometimes it's so easy to say,"of course you gotta protect your dignity." but when it comes to making tough choices like this, dignity over safety, where do you stand? maybe the world isn't as black and white as i thought. shades of gray do exist in the choices we have to make in life. on a similar theme, at the other end of the road, was the young police who started out with ethics. he decided that what the other police did to the girl was wrong and wanted to voice out. but like always, making tough choices. how do you take a stand against bad superiors? and it was compeltely ironic how he who would stand against racism and fight back for them would end up killing the that dude, what's his name? he too submitted to stereotyping and paranoia and this really makes me wonder, just how far can we get pushed before we lose our ethics and eventually ourselves? i can imagine after all he's been through that he must be standing next to the dead body and wondering, how did i get here? i love how in great debaters, that dude, i forgot his name too, he said to the debaters something like 'i am here to make sure you never lose your mind." maybe i'm not thinking about it in the same context as he is but it's just, a mind is a terrible thing to lose. and the fact that you can lose it is just scary.

i loved how the movie depicted similar themes through different stories and all the lose ends were tied up together at the end. like whoa.

i love the interconnectedness of the people and the choices they make. isn't it incredible to think that every single step you take will bring to a set place? like one different move can change your future completely. like when the persian guy's daughter chose the bullets that were actually blanks. and because of that the locksmith's daughter survived. like in the end we find that the choices we make, whether knowingly or not, are already forming our future.

it was really cool too that even in a world of 'bad'-i don't like stereotyping good and bad anymore but for lack of better word...- there are still good people. like the locksmith. he too was just looking for a safe place in an unsafe world. he was a goodman, doing a legal, respectable job to help his family survive in a cruel world. but still, even with a good heart, you still have to be pushed around and discriminated, but he hangs in there for his family. he was my favourite character in the whole movie i think. his daughter too was so beautifully innocent when she jumped on him to save him from the bullet and just wow. the dude was shooting blank bullets!!! i cried like crazy then man. pipe burst lor.

and man, racial discrimination sucks big time. people can be so cruel, much more than i ever imagined. i like the story of the apples, i heard it when i was younger, how this mom took three apples, one yellow, one green and one red to teach her daughter about different races. and they were all obviously different from the outside but when she cut off the skin, her daughter could not differentiate between the three anymore, be it by taste or looks. and that really should be the way we all live. it doesn't matter what colour your skin is or where you're from, what matters is who you are and what you do in life. that should determine how much respect you deserve. i quote martin luther king jr.- "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." i find that quote very very meaningful.

haha, one last thing i wanted to talk about was what i thought of from watching NCIS yesterday. is it less wrong to kill/hurt a person who deserves it? like yesterday, the murderer on NCIS only killed bad men who abandoned their families for prostitudes. and well to hear of how badly they treated their families, it would seem they deserved to die. like if you hurt them now, they can't inflict pain on other people anymore kind of thing? so it's pretty blur i guess, but what i learnt from priscilla's absolute moral truth lesson is that the Bible says it is wrong to murder, do not judge, let God judge. and i guess it's not my decision to hurt the bad people as in like with violence or whatever (not that i am a violent person at all) but i am called to protect the hurt and comfort those in need and find another way to save people from pain without resorting to lowly ways such as those. you get me? man, this sounds more demented than it did in my mind. i guess basically, if it is God's will, He will provide a way. just make sure it's His will, not your brain backfiring and causing u to do something real stupid.

really, all this stuff about humanity fascinates me so. i wonder what kind of profession could link to this. =P but anyways, i have like 17 minutes of break left. gonna chao now, bye!