What is Worth Standing For

Transcript

I want to talk to you about a movie I saw. It’s called the “Bridge of Spies” and I warn you of spoilers here. But you know what spoilers are kinda bs to be honest with you because we all know what’s going to happen at the end of our lives.

And we kinda know when we watch a Hollywood movie, we know the good guys are all gonna win. So why does it bother us if we discover some part of the story in advance?

The point of a story is to get involved emotionally. People watch movies they’ve seen many times before because they know they’re gonna be engaged. They’re gonna put some skin in the game of what is essentially a fantasy but because we put that empathy, we give that empathy to the characters we can learn some of the lessons.

Okay the film came out in 2015. If you haven’t seen it yet maybe I can convince you by spoiling it for you. So this movie starring Tom Hanks called Bridge of Spies. Tom Hanks is this insurance lawyer and for one reason or another he gets appointed.

People ask him to defend an accused Soviet spy. They want to give the appearance of a fair trial but what they don’t realize is Hanks’ is such a stand up guy that he actually wants a fair trial.

So when the Judge comes to him saying “Come on, he’s a spy”. Not an alleged spy. Or the CIA says “Come on, aren’t you going to break your lawyer client privilege with us?”

He says “No, I’m not gonna do that because this is a country of laws.”

And this is interesting because sometimes we watch movies from the United States a lot of people complain that it’s like Yankee Rah rah nonsense. But here we can see the judge, the CIA are a tiny bit corrupt. But there’s this man who won’t sacrifice his ideals just because of one situation.

There’s a scene where the accused spy says “you know, you’re something different. You remind me of this man I saw in my home town”. And Hanks says “Yeah?”.

“My father said to me: this man, you watch this man. Something interesting about this man.” And the spy says he watched this man for weeks and months and he never did anything remarkable.

And Hanks says “Ah, so I remind you of this man?”

The spy says “Yes, the one day the secret police came and started to beat him up. Every time they beat him up he got back up and just was standing there. Standing there they called him, just standing there. A man whose ideals and strength of character won’t be knocked down or if they are, they simply get back up again.”

And of course in the movie he has to travel to the Democratic Republic of Deutschland, the part of Germany that was affected with socialism with an alliance with the Soviet Union. And he sees young boys trying to climb over the Berlin Wall just after it was erected trying to get back to their families and being beaten because of it.

Of course, later in the movie near the end, Hanks is on an elevated train line in his home city and he sees young boys trying to climb over a fence just trying to pick up a ball or something like that. He remembers and you can see in his face that he’s so grateful he lives in a country where freedom is respected, at least some of the time.

But this character, this historical character, is one of these men that won’t just bend down, won’t just lay down and let injustices happen. It’s because of people like these that society advances. People who stand up, standing men and standing women who say “an ideal is more important, an idea counts more than the circumstances.”

So my question for me and for you is “what is so important for you, what will you stand for? What example will you set for your children for those around you that they see that people can stand up?”

Thank you for reading, thank you for staying grateful and thank you for thinking beautifully.