Luck

I'm generally not a poignant quote kind of a guy, but I was really moved by this yesterday:

"I wanted to acknowledge luck; the chance and benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others, who might not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it."

Who said it? It was Paul Newman. Newman passed away yesterday after a long battle with cancer - or maybe better to say after an 83 year lifetime of fortune and corrections. This quote was shared by his assistant in an obituary that Kate and I were reading last night.

Why is this poignant to me? Because it so deftly distills much of my basic philosophy on life and so clearly differentiates two of my most internally-debated concepts: luck and providence. Remaining intentionally coy here, I'll just say that I definitely side with the former.

And why am I commenting on this here? Because I can't wait to have conversations with Jonas about this pair of concepts (years from now, sure)...and, more importantly, I can't wait to watch Jonas go through his own process of parsing this out on his own - to watch him make up his own mind. Hopefully my luck will continue, and he'll have lots of it too, so that we can share a lifetime of ever-correcting luck together.

I just saw an amazing documentary and I want to go tell it on the mountain.

Wow! It's very seldom that I see a movie that makes me want to tell everyone I know, "Hey, you gotta check this out." Especially a documentary, because Kate and I see so many social and cultural documentaries. But I just finished watching a documentary called "Street Fight" (a film by writer/director/producer/etc. Marshall Curry) and, "Hey, you gotta check this out."

I know I'm a bit behind the times, since this movie is several years old and maybe everyone reading this has already seen it, but this amazing film really snuck up on me. "Street Fight" tells the story of candidate Cory Booker during his 2002 bid to become the mayor of Newark, New Jersey. The film pits Booker, a 32 year old wunderkind (Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law graduate, former Stanford University football standout) versus the established 32-year! incumbent, Sharpe James. I love that name, it's almost as telegraphic about his M.O. as Boss Tweed's name was. And Sharpe James's political machine is probably just as entertaining to watch in action. Watch as James's flunkies continuously grab the lens of the documentarian's camera as he films a public! event on a public! street in the City of Newark. Watch as James brings three busloads of pollworkers in from PHILADELPHIA on the day of the election while simultaneously claiming that all of his pollworkers are volunteers while Booker's are all paid outsiders ("He's a carpetbagger. He can't buy this election," Sharpe quips.) Watch as James racebaits Booker by saying that he is backed by "Jews and the Ku Klux Klan." Both Booker and James are African American, by the way.

One of the reasons I'm compelled to blog about this now is that it seems very well timed. I can't help but compare Booker to Obama, and if you watch I think you'll see the same intense spirit of optimism in the two. If you have Netflix, this is available on their "Watch Instantly" feature, which is how I watched it. Also, I'll just point out that this film was actually nominated for an Academy Award in 2005 for Best Documentary Feature. Here's the trailer, should you need more enticement.