The Girl in the Café

Saw a really good movie on DVD last night, The Girl in the Café with Bill Nighy and Kelly MacDonald. Nighy was perfect as the tightly-bound, lonely, vacillating civil servant. How I ached for him and his inability to emote. When he says: "I know a lot about certain things. Transport. Development. But sod all about everything else. Including, obviously, real life" you want to, I don't know, inject him with something, some colour, some chutzpah, something.

What's brilliant about the movie is that it doubles as a bit of propaganda for the issue of world poverty. The tag line: Love can't change what's wrong with the world, but it's a start, doesn't do it justice, but it gives you an idea.

I become horribly angry when I watch or read anything about the unfairness that is our world. I want to immediately race out and fix something. I feel so frustrated with my uselessness, my inability to make a difference.

As I lie awake in bed thinking about what I could do, I began thinking art and its potential to make us think... to make us feel.

Oddly, my brain flipped to The Scream by Edvard Munch. Let me begin by saying how much I hate this picture. If I come across it in a book, I will flip by the page trying not to look at it. If it's on a wall somewhere, I will look away and be very conscious about not looking back. The Scream fills me with despair. It makes me think of concentration camps, of insane asylums. In his diary, Munch wrote about his inspiration for the piece: "I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun was setting—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence—there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city—my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

It is the image of this painting that came to me as I was thinking of the agony of parents who cannot feed their children or keep them safe. Who can see those images in the news and not be moved to think "what if...?"

(Perhaps, by definition, The Scream, is for me the greatest painting ever. It's impact on me is tremendous.)

I think our feelings of helplessness keep us from doing anything. It keeps us focused on those things we can do something about. Mundane things like preparing a meal or ridding the garden of weeds. Accomplishable, realistic goals.

The thing of it is, I think we can do something concrete to make a difference. One of the most effective actions is to make our voices heard. Politicians do what we require of them to do. Was the environment on the political radar in any serious way even five years ago? Now, every political party in Canada is arm-wrestling to be seen as greener than the others.

We can do the same on the issue of poverty. Get involved. Write a letter. Sign a petition. Give of your time. There comes a point when critical mass weighs in our favour and world leaders can no longer ignore the voices of the masses.

It's a matter of political survival.

Colleen