At NBN we love watching Hollywood heroes. Productive workdays grind to halt when we happen upon YouTubes of Platoon, The Big Short, Shawshank Redemption, Do the Right Thing, and Fiddler on the Roof to name a few. What kind of heroes are Teyva and Mookie? They are real people who do the right thing, simply because it’s the right thing to do, not to save the world from some evil menace. Kind of like Jesus, before he became a “Christian,” or Allah before he became “Great.”
The evil NBN’s Hollywood heroes fight is an inconspicuous sort which masquerades as being good through traditions and beliefs so ingrained adherents unquestioningly use them as moral yardsticks to measure their own self-worth. The kind of evil that’s often called good by the people holding those yardsticks.
This issue of NBN is not about good and evil, or even Hollywood script-writers, per se. It’s about the people we so often find holding the yardsticks. People that for the purposes of this post we will refer to as cheaters.
There are all kinds of cheaters in this world, but they all share one thing: they take advantage of weakness. In some respects such cheating is perfectly fine. A 400-pound lion snapping the neck of a defenseless baby gazelle is nature’s way. But a genius, sweat-of-the-brow investor goading colleagues less-so into making a malignant bet that ultimately cripples the global economy? Or a Bed-Sty pizza delivery boy leading the looting of his place of work for not sufficiently respecting the community it has served for 25 years?
When it comes to humans, defining cheating depends on discerning good from evil. That gets tricky and that’s where the people with the yardsticks step in. People like priests, politicians and script writers—let’s call them poets, for alliteration purposes. We trust them to explain and interpret the morality of such conflicts and sadly, they too cheat. More and more, these days. It’s just nature’s way, right? But is it human nature? Do we want it to be? Cheating, a success story, in our Winter 2019-20 Blog.
