The Big Kahuna ReflectionThe Big Kahuna ReflectionThere are a lot of underlying issues and themes that can be obtained from the movie The Big Kahuna, but the way that some of these issues are portrayed in the movie can be better described if being watched many times instead of just once.
During the movie the statement is made by Phil that “The world is full of clocks, Bob. Clocks and mirrors.” The statement is made when Bob asks if Phil wears a watch. There are many ways that this statement can be taken, but to me it states that people today are to busy worrying about the time and possibly to busy looking in mirrors to really see what is going on in today’s society. We are constantly on a schedule that contains meetings, appointments, and conventions that we are constantly looking at the time so we can rush through our days and our lives. This is something, as college students, that we constantly say we will never let ourselves fall into, but we will never understand our statement until placed into the situation. Only then will it become clear to us why people live their lives this way.
Bob also makes an interesting comment about Phil being divorced say he could never see himself getting a divorce from his wife. Phil responds by saying “The picture becomes very clear, after a very short period of time.” This is a perfect example that shows even sometimes as Christians we are constantly judging and trying to force others to measure up without always understanding what the underlying meaning consists. Christians sometimes have a concrete agenda as to what is right and wrong and sometimes refuse to accept anything less than what they feel is right. We are constantly judging others when we don’t understand their situation of their circumstances. If we were to live just a few short moments in their lives I feel the picture would become clear in a matter of seconds. This is what I feel Phil means by his statement. Its easy to not understand what you have never lived through, but walking in another’s shoes would probably clear up a lot of our questions in a very short period of time.
Later on in the conversation there are two comments that are made to Bob. Larry saying that “You as a person don’t really matter, It is what you represent”. In the setting I would take this as Bob not having much experience with the type of convention they are participating or holding, but as long as he represents someone who knows what they’re doing he will be fine. This is something that is constantly taking place in our world everyday. Everyone at some point wanders through life and continues to get lost, but on the outside we portray someone who has everything together and need no ones help because we are scared of what other people may see, fell, think, or possibly if it may change someone’s opinion about us. Phil follows this comment by saying “What we are is more important than who we are.” There
The discussion on “what we are” continues.
When the question of who we are really began to circulate in the late 1990s there was discussion of a possible change in the perception of the race of the future being about those who were black, to those who were white. At one time there was discussion about the possibility of being asked about ‘who we are’ during a presidential debates, especially during a time when we had been in the dark about the issues of race. After years of a national narrative about this topic, there is now a debate about whether this change in perceived values means we are more likely to support what I feel is a better and more inclusive political party in the years coming. And, most recently, there was continued discussion about this topic at the University of Utah.
When it came for many to suggest that if we were to bring the ‘new race’ into the arena, we would have a new system in place and we were not changing our race. The primary reason we had a national narrative in place that was being used against any of us that looked like we were fighting for racial equality on a national level was because of this ‘new’ race in the 1990s. I think that was one motivation, the other was because people believed that we could make it work for other people with which they had zero experience. That is true. However, this didn’t work; what happened in the 1990s wasn’t what was happening. Why was it true. We didn’t take those narratives as reality. We took them as political realities that reflected our individual experiences which were important.
While we have been very active in the development of and support of the ‘new race,’ we also have made the decisions to bring the ‘new race’ under the banner of the ‘New Movement’ as a campaign that is both grassroots and institutional, and to build grassroots groups within a broad political campaign to stand up for the rights and social movements that we think are important for people of color. People of color often get to watch it unfold. We don’t just talk about what we do, or what we are up against; that is what really matters. We are not the political outsiders that we may sometimes be, and as a society we need to change where we are. We continue to build an amazing political network that can empower people of color to make changes at our local, state and national level. As we work to build more activists within the movement our efforts are moving together. Even beyond the effort to create a grassroots movement, what we are working on are working to build the movement to expand what is important to all of us across the nation, both in the Democratic and Republican parties, to make the politics of civil justice as inclusive as it can be.
As a growing percentage of the American electorate is on these same issues, there is growing concern that if our political leaders or candidates take the time to reflect on what they do that their voters will reject what they have elected or that they will reject the political process as being too complex to engage in. The reality