We All Have Crashed

I just finished watching Crash. It was a newer movie and it was confronting the racial situation in America. I really wasn’t prepared for what I saw, but nonetheless it made me think about stuff in a different perspective. The movie was incredibly directed and told about five or six different stories of different people and families lives that end up interacting with each other in peculiar and extreme ways. It was a mix of black, white, Chinese, Arab, middle eastern and other races in the storyline and the story eventually came together so I think almost every character interacted with the other at some point.

We watched as a white woman was absolutely terrified of black men and didn’t trust them. She proceeded to get robbed by two black guys who take her car and leave her unharmed. She then had a locksmith who was a different race who she didn’t trust (the locksmith was the most honest guy in the movie). She then fell down the stairs and hurt herself and her maid who was a different race was the only one who would take care of her and all her friends wouldn’t help her. In the end her only enemy was herself and her expectations and perspective were all wrong and failed her. She couldn’t understand herself and why she was so unhappy. She failed herself

It was expectations and perspectives like this that were blown throughout the entire movie. A man who got upset at the same locksmith because he was racist toward him and let his anger get the best of him was even more angered when his store got robbed because someone broke into through the lock (which was never the locksmiths fault). He then went to the locksmith’s house and pulled the trigger at the locksmith at the same time that his daughter was jumping into his hands. He would have killed the locksmith’s daughter if his own daughter had not loaded the guns with blanks without his knowledge. For the rest of the movie he couldn’t believe himself that his racial anger actually brought him to a point where he could pull a trigger with a little girl in front of himself. He failed himself.

Another man sat there and didn’t say a word while his wife was molested by a cop; he knew that if he fought against it they would have been arrested and hurt more. After this episode, his wife was furious with him that he wouldn’t do anything. The next time he got pulled over, he lost his temper and went off on the cops thinking that being passive got him in more trouble than mouthing off. He almost got shot by the police officer and died. He couldn’t win. He went against his own convictions to be passive and honoring to everyone and snapped, and he almost died. He failed himself.

This man’s wife, the one that got molested, soon found herself in a car accident. Who was the only one there quick enough to save her? The man who molested her. She had to suck up her pride and allow him to save her. She didn’t think that anyone who could molest her could be good enough to save her. She eventually allowed him to save her. She almost died because of her pride.

The cop who molested and saved the same girl all in a few minutes was a racist fanatic. That’s because his dad that was one of the only men in the world at his time who hired black people and paid them fair wage to work. Eventually he got screwed over somehow through the government for his work and lost everything all in one night. Now he’s sick and dying and his son, the cop, blamed black people. He was absolutely brutal to them through the entire movie and it ended up costing him his father’s medicine (because a black receptionist wouldn’t help him because of how rude he was) and his father was going to die. He had to face himself when he had to save the girl he just treated like garbage. Maybe his form of thinking wasn’t all that right? His way of blaming people and hating those people eventually caught up with him and he was put on the same level as everyone else. He failed himself.

How often to we build judgments of other people before we even meet them? Whether it’s racial or not. I know that I can walk into a church pretty quick and look at the pastor on stage and have a complete judgment in my mind about who that person is and what I do and don’t like about him before I even leave. We all think at times that our prejudices towards people or the reasons we don’t like people are warranted. Eventually these things we are holding on to will fail, and we will be left knowing that we are all the same and we will all fail ourselves. There is only one way of living, only one person and only one way that we won’t fail. With, by and through Jesus Christ.