CRASH

I recently watched the Academy Award winning movie Crash for the first time. The movie focused on racism. But I was impacted most by the concept that our choices not only impact the people we are close to but also strangers we have never met before.

We live increasingly in a society that values rights more than responsibilities. Many celebrate this as the result of a long hard struggle for acceptance. But I wonder if we have swung the pendulum too far. It is undeniable that our individual actions impact others no matter how influential we consider ourselves to be. In some way we impact our workplace, our community, our town or city, and maybe even our nation in ways we don't understand.

In an increasingly globalized society our actions in our tiny hamlet could easily influence someone in a completely different part of the world. Yet many of us continue to celebrate the new Age of Individual Rights under the pretense that our actions affect only ourselves.