February 2012
ElPasoFishNet
By Randy Limbird
In a couple of recent conversations about various world problems, a scene from the 1991 movie “Grand Canyon” kept popping into my head.
You may remember the scene. Kevin Kline plays a lawyer whose luxury car breaks down after taking the wrong turn in Los Angeles. A tow truck driver played by Danny Glover shows up, but by then a gang of young men has surrounded the car, threatening the lawyer, and blocking the tow truck driver’s attempts to help.
“Man, the world ain't supposed to work like this,” the tow truck driver tells the gun-wielding gang leader. “I mean, maybe you don't know that yet. I'm supposed to be able to do my job without having to ask you if I can. That dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you ripping him off. Everything is supposed to be different than it is.”
The Danny Glover character speaks for most of us. On any given day, we can easily come face to face with a situation that merits the same response: “The world ain’t supposed to work like this.” If our personal problems don’t trigger that reaction, all we have to do read the day’s news.
Our economy, government, schools, health care, families … how many areas of our world work they way they are supposed to? Even if we think we know what the “supposed to” would look like, we have a hard figuring out what road would take us there.
I don’t think is something new. Imagine the world of Jesus’ day: A nation under foreign oppression. Religious leaders who dictated every detail of people’s lives. The poor and the lame regarded as pariahs. That doesn’t sound like the way the world was supposed to work either.
Here are three ways we typically look at the evil we see in the world:
• This is the best of all possible worlds, a philosophy popularized by the famous optimist Pangloss in Moliere’s “Candide.” This is an approach that tends to overlook evil or to simply accept it the inevitable price of existence.
• The world is broken but I’m not. We accept that the world around us is a mess, but somehow we are good and if the world was filled with people like us, everything would be OK.
• The world is broken and so am I. We detect in ourselves some of the same mutated DNA that accounts for the mess we see around us. The selfishness, anger, pride, etc. that influence us are related to the causes of evil on a worldwide scale.
I say “mutated” because not only is the world not supposed to work like this, but if we’re honest, much of the time we are not working like we’re supposed to.
Oddly enough, there are people who admit they cannot fix their own personal issues and yet think they have the answers to the world’s problems. Some of them even run for office!
Trying to fix a broken world and trying to fix a broken self are not exclusive. In fact, trying to do one without the other maintains our self-deception about both.
I believe the third view is the Christian world view. What’s wrong at the world level is also tied to what is wrong at the personal level. And we cannot fix either on our own.
Randy Limbird is editor of
El Paso Scene. Comments?
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