Saving Silverman. No, Really

Let me take another crack at this. Some days I get carried away with thinking too much. On any given day the evening news will feature the worse eight news stories there are in the world. It's just the nature of things. They have to give people a reason to tune in after the commercial. The anxiety sells a lot of products. They will never say, "ten thousand NFL athletes and former athletes went home to their wives and children after work today. They hugged their wives and tossed a football with their boys, and mowed the lawn. Locally, Joey Harrington raised ten thousand dollars for his charitable foundation and went to Mass." It just doesn't have the same punch as the sordid and deplorable actions of a couple of monsters.

Imagine too some diarist of a philosophical bent, in the midst of The Bubonic Plague or The Holocaust, writing to himself (because that's what all of us are doing, as much as we want an audience) "everything is impossibly grim. The end is certainly near" or aggrieved words to that effect. He would have been dead wrong. Even if he himself were dead the next day.

The beauty and chief virtue of humankind is our resilience. We erect monuments to the dead and plant gardens, and we go on. We withstand evil and disease and unwise kings. We birth our babies and raise them with love and hope. Especially the mothers. That's why this day is so important. The follies of humankind, the excesses and outrages and demoralizing failures, are chiefly the work of men. Women are the true wisdom of the world. They nurture the hope. They instill the dreams. They keep things together when everything is collapsing. They keep everyone fed and bathed, and endure another day, no matter what the headlines are. Mothers are the strength and heart of civilizations. They are the reason hope is possible, the soul of our resilience.

Last night we watched a movie called "Saving Silverman." It was utterly silly, full of stupid pratfralls and gross jokes. Neil Diamond saved the day with a song. Everybody got married in the end, for no plausible reason, and Jack Black discovered he was gay and in love with his high school football coach. The movie didn't make a lick of sense, didn't track from one scene to the next, didn't have a point or a purpose. And I loved it. It was the perfect antidote to all my self-important misery. People still love. They still hope. It's a sunny day and I'm having a cold beer in my living room, just six ounces to be sociable, and my wife is chatting with the Latino mother who lives upstairs, about exercise moves and hair color and kids. Mothers will resolve the cultural conflicts. They'll connect to one another and raise their kids with pride. "We're comin' to America" Neil Diamond sang. Welcome home.