Most moral show on TV?

** ** Saw an ad in Newsweek for a new television series called Random1. As I was programming the info into my Tivo I noticed that the show would be starting just five minutes later. So I watched.

Amazing concept: people helping people unselfishly. One of their (many) tag lines is: “Making a difference is what they “try” to do.” I like the honesty of that. As their logo also states: “No ordinary mission – No contrived endings”

There are just too many good things about the show to list here, but here are a couple of the strongest:

1. Sometimes you have to break the rules in order to help. This goes against all rigid views of morality, but the show demonstrated the kind of exception that is more moral: An alcoholic they were trying to get admitted to a detox center started shaking and needed a drink to settle down while his helpers searched for a place that would take him in. So they stopped at a convenience store and bought him a big bottle of beer. They did this twice. He eventually not only got de-toxed, he went into a treatment home and by show’s end they noted that he had been sober for 80 days and was working again and seeing his kids. Today, they posted an update on the guy and he's still doing fine. As Saul Alinksy said in essence: “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?”

2. The guys openly admit they don’t know squat about what they’re doing. They’re not professional sociologists or care givers. Just ordinary guys (luckily, one of whom happens to be a documentary filmmaker) trying to put into practice the dictum: “Practice random acts of kindness.” The show obviously has substantial financial and technical backing but it’s amazing that they can keep their honesty during this process. This helps the rest of us civilians see possibilities in ourselves for this kind of generic, unconditional love.

I find the show, so far, very Christian in its approach, but certainly not in any way up front about it. (Just once, Mark, the alcoholic, comments about his transformation: "It must have been a God thing.") That’s also refreshing. True Christianity is in the practice not the preaching, in ordinary life, not temples and churches.

Here’s a sample from their mission statement:

The mission of Random 1 in real life, on television, and on the web is to make a positive difference in the lives of strangers picked “at random”. Random 1 LLC is a media production company that documents the stories of helping people.

Currently, Random 1, LLC is preparing ten one-hour television shows that will air on A&E Television Networks beginning in November 2005

I just like this poem and want to share it

** I couldn't find this anywhere on the Internet, so here it is:

Seen Through a Window
David Ferry

A man and a woman are sitting at a table.
It is supper time. The air is green. The walls
Are white in the green air, as rocks under water
Retain their own true color, though washed in green.
I do not know either the man or the woman,
Nor do I know whatever they know of each other.
Though washed in my eye they keep their own true color.

The man is all his own hunched strength, the body’s
Self and strength, that bears, like weariness,
Itself upon itself, as a stone’s weight
Bears heavily on itself to be itself.
Heavy the strength that bears the body down.
And the way he feeds is like a dreamless sleep;
The dreaming of a stone is how he feeds.

The woman’s arms are plump, mottled a little
The flesh, like standing milk, and on one arm
A blue bruise, got in some household labor or other,
Flowering in the white. Her staring eye,
Like some bird’s cry called from some deepest wood,
Says nothing of what it is but what it is.
Such silence is the bird’s cry of a stone.

Maybe it'll stop being crazy after all these years!

** I went to bed early last night, before the California election returns were fully counted. At that point it looked like the Governator's propositions, that I voted against, were winning, and the two I voted for were losing. It was depressing - having endured the incredible insult of the Bush second term and its slow, tortuous unravelling - like a desecrated mummy - I just couldn't imagine surviving in a world where official insanity continues to parade around like a naked emperor.

I woke up just a few hours later from a scary dream in which a crazy man was out to slash me. The words of Paul Simon's great song "Still crazy after all these years" then started going around and around in my head:

Now I sit by my window and I watch the cars
I fear I'll do some damage one fine day
But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers
Still crazy after all these years
Still crazy, still crazy, still crazy after all these years

Then I read a couple of blogs that commented on the West Wing episode last Sunday, which broke some new TV ground by having its characters, presidential candidates, have a "live" debate. I had been thinking about how brilliant Alan Alda (in real life a Liberal) was in that role, so smoothly and intelligently articulating a political stance that I find abhorrent. It further depressed me that there are no Democrats with similar skills - although Jimmy Smits did a creditable job of articulating the Left's positions - and the audience that voted agreed he'd won the debate. Read these two blogs for a good description of the event: Russell Roberts in Cafe Hayek and George's at seixon.

It laid another stone on my depressed head. The crazies have got all the power, the style, the opportunity!

And then at 2:30AM I checked sfgate.com for the election results: All eight ballot initiatives fail! Even though the two I voted for didn't make it, the failure of the Governor's props lifted my mood. Hope is stirring (barely) - the whole bad dream may be dissolving. (Ah, dreamer!)