Tomorrowland

We took the kids to see Tomorrowland a few days ago and I’ve gotta say, I really enjoyed it.  I’d heard that it was all about how evil humans were destroying the earth and honestly I just didn’t see that.

Tomorrowland has been compared to Wall-E, which I really don’t think is fair.  Wall-E basically came right out and said that fat Americans were gonna pollute the earth into oblivion.

The message I took away from Tomorrowland wasn’t that fat Americans were going to destroy the world, but that destroying the world is all fat Americans care to hear about.  And that’s pretty accurate.

Watch the news about any of the current tropical storms and you’ll see that it’s true.  A “news reporter” was actually on TV talking about how an underpass had already flooded along the Texas coast before Tropical Storm Bill made landfall.  (The “underpass” was actually a bridge.  Over water.  Nothing had flooded…because it hadn’t started raining yet.)  But the media will DO anything and SAY anything to get us to panic.  And we love it.  We’ll eat up any sort of terrible news that the media will feed us.

We love hearing doom and gloom about tomorrow because it means that nothing is expected of us today.

If we believe that all marriages end in divorce, we won’t feel obligated to work so hard at keeping our marriages healthy.

If we think that all pre-teen boys are medicated to keep them “normal”, we won’t feel obligated to work with our boys to navigate puberty without help from pharmaceutical companies.

If we think that all politicians are crooked (they’re actually bothering to report that Ted Cruz….gasp….possessed beer before he was 21 years old), then we’ll feel so hopeless about the future of our country that we won’t bother watching debates or getting out to vote.

Hopelessness is a terrible emotion to endure, but it can also be pretty comforting…because hopelessness doesn’t expect anything of us.  Loving our families creates work for us.  Caring about our country creates work for us.  But as long as we keep feeding ourselves despair, we’ll never feel the urge to work at anything.

Garbage In-Garbage Out has always been true.  And Tomorrowland does a great job of pointing that out.  Which wolf will we feed?  The wolf of despair or the wolf of hope?

It cost my family $34 to see Tomorrowland and personally, I’d pay that much money just to let my kids hear the bad guy’s rant at the end of the movie, which culminated in that notion….that a cynical view of tomorrow is comforting to us because it absolves us of any responsibility for today.

We’ll be buying it, just so I can sit down with the kids and have a conversation about the bad guy’s speech at the end of the movie and how right he is….but how we’re going to prove him wrong.