…The More They Stay the Same

Amazon Prime recently featured the 1938 romantic comedy film HOLIDAY, starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. The names of the stars may be unfamiliar to most of the population today, but I found the conflicts oddly appropriate to our times. The story opens with a hard-working, intelligent young man arriving at a mansion that he doesn’t realize belongs to the family of the girl he wants to marry. The first problem is that he’s not from their wealthy social class, although his fiancée is certain he’s about to reach that level due to his business acumen. The central issue, hence the title, is that he intends to use the profits from his first major financial success not to build a foundation of expanding wealth, but to stop working for a year so he can enjoy being alive and discover who he is beyond his lifetime of earning.

His rich family-to-be is appalled—with the exception of an older daughter and son who’ve been controlled and restricted by their father over the years for being independent and too fun-loving. The patriarch and his youngest daughter are confident they can persuade her intended to postpone his plan for a couple years, knowing once he’s deeply installed in the family business he won’t be able to tear himself away. They tell him his dream is selfish and dangerously unAmerican. Success must be defined with money.

Similarly, economics was cited as a major concern in the recent American election. Many people didn’t think they were being paid enough to meet their costs. They were told unworthy people such as immigrants and liberals must be at fault as the information that reached them was carefully managed, making blame comfortable. The country can feel the tension as lines are drawn between the worthy and unworthy, according to whomever is in charge. Nazi values have been flaunted in Ohio as they once were in Germany around 1938. For the marchers then and now, talent, intelligence, and ambition pale beside an unscientific notion of superior genetic purity. Ignorance feels safer and more familiar than arrogant broad perspectives. People are weary of being frightened by diseases, disaster, and crime. Simple answers such as being prepared for a shoot-out seem to be the best course. Surely we can all slip back to a simpler time—taking our cell phones and guns with us. We need to purge the foreigners and over-educated who’ve complicated our lives, while we preserve streaming services.

When the United States was temporarily a beacon of open-mindedness, many warned that we live in a revolving cycle of social reform and traditionalism. Many scoffed. They couldn’t believe the United States could choose to slide backward. Watching films from 1938 suggests the existence of a repetitive cycle may be true. Like the young man in the film, each of us has a choice to make. Life is a maelstrom of choices. Although we can’t direct the majority population around us, we can direct our own lives and create a bubble of compassion and tolerance around ourselves. We don’t have to condone all behavior, but we grow when we take the trouble to understand reasons and viewpoints unlike our own. Like the doctor played by Zack Quinto on the TV series BRILLIANT MINDS, we can avoid judgement as we listen and seek out practical ways or even compromises to move forward. We can act on the values we say we respect. We can have fun and be the person we were sent here to be. We must identify what we treasure most highly or we might accidentally lose it.