Shadow Puppet Storyteller

Having missed Extraordinary Measures

I make crazy routes along the internet sometimes, I admit it. If "driving" the Information Superhighway was anything like real driving, they'd take away my license (that, or my husband would refuse to go on so many "scenic drives")! Well, sometimes I just waste time. Other times I have a definite purpose (at least when I start out). In this case, I went looking for ANY available showtimes for a couple movies that had already come out a month or more ago. Unfortunately, for me neither movie I had in mind is a current indy "Oscar" contender, nor the uber-popular and long-lived Avatar.

To make this simple, I'll just tell you one of the movies I was tracking down. The movie is called, Extraordinary Measures, released in mid- to late January 2010. I never actually found out if it was still hanging on in some discount cinema twenty to forty miles from me, because I got caught up reading a short article out of the Midland Daily News. http://ourmidland.com/articles/2010/02/14/local_news/2387321.txt#blogcomments That would be a local media outlet for Midland, Michigan, not Midland Texas. And that distinction only makes a difference if you pick up from the article that there seems to be a higher concentration of children from Michigan being diagnosed with Pompe's disease. The first comment, spurred on by this basic human-interest story, was taken-on vehemently by most people who later decided to also comment.

The commenter plainly indicated that such children once were allowed to die, thus saving society a lot of money. This is not an exact quote, but it is nearly as stark as the way the "Teresa" leaving the comment put it forward. Some people tried to ignore it. Others went ballistic (only one or two skirted threatening abuse to the woman.) As usual, I wasn't completely incensed, as a matter of fact, at first, I don't think I quite got it. The only kindness the poster used was to substitute "pass" for "die," and I think that's where I had to read it over a few times to fully pick up what she was implying. I did end up making a comment myself -- and I wondered, without putting it into my own posted comments, really wondered -- Could she have been told those same stark words herself, once long ago, and actually come to believe that the rest of society did not know the facts?

Teresa sees a world with "scarce resources." Luckily, there are individuals who live courageously beyond mere facts of life, and inspire society to do better than "what's best." The Crowley parents took measures into their own hands to encourage something extraordinary, as the movie title implies. I think this article and the comments here speak to the desire of many to have hope rather than just face facts. It's not just about America, or American society when someone suggests that our current health care debate may return us to a backwater age.

Let's embrace the struggle that drives all of Life. We can globally improve if willing. We can be appalled by what Teresa screamed into the Void, or we can be grateful that we stopped to notice; just think -- and possibly expanded our view of what is truly important.