I watched McFarland USA [2015] tonight; one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.
IMDB:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2097298/?ref_=nv_sr_1
McFarland, California, in 1987, was a place where the townspeople were there because they had nowhere else to go. Pickers, mainly; not unlike the people of the San Quintin valley of Baja, Mexico. Kids waking up at 4:30a to go pick in the fields until it’s time for school; after school they run to the fields and pick until dark, so that their families can survive. They don’t get paid by the hour, they get paid by the field. They pick because their parents pick, and that’s the only life they’ve ever known; and the only life they ever expect to have. Pickers, all of their lives.
Here, in America. Land of the Free. Home of the Brave.
We forget this, those of us who have lived with the electronic luxury of America all of our lives. I am of the opinion that we will have to address this forgetfulness when we stand before our Creator.
A high-school coach named Jim White [Coach Blanco] came to McFarland because he had a temper management problem; and it was the only job he could find. After a couple months he watched these kids running through the fields and decided to create a Cross-Country running team. Seven high school kids who had been working their hearts out for years, and happened to be very fast. White convinced these kids that they had more heart than any of the privileged Cross-Country teams competing in California; and that they actually had a chance to become winners.
The kids, through a LOT of hard work, realized they could be something no one else in their town’s history had become—a champion. The kids changed the town. And the town changed the Coach and his family; they learned the true meaning of Home and Family. The father’s role to eat with his family, and to listen to the stories of their lives, rather than making other things more important.
I didn’t watch the debates tonight; there is nothing that either candidate could say that would change my opinion of them. They don’t represent McFarland, or any of the hundreds [thousands?] of McFarlands scattered across this country. The people who have been ostracized by privilege; the people who harvest the food this country eats. Many/most of them have brown skin. Many won’t ever own land; many won’t ever have the luxury of a television—it isn’t needed; many won’t read books. A book won’t help you pick crops. I spent an incredibly long/short time on a wheat ranch in Eastern Oregon when I was 16; my Dad wanted me to learn how to work. His old friend, a wheat rancher who probably followed in his family’s steps, could never understand why I carried a paperback book to read when I’d finished a chore; I don’t know that he ever read. I couldn’t get the idea that I was supposed to go from one chore to the next one. I learned how to stall a caterpillar tractor in a steeply-plowed field. Also learned to crawl into a Combine, and replace bad ‘teeth’.
The experiment wasn’t successful.
My brain is full; I really don’t know how to end this one.
Jones History; Near Condon, Oregon ca.1930s
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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 