It's a Wonderful Life.

Just watched ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ where George Bailey, with good heart and ‘not a thought for himself’, runs Bedford Falls not for profit ‘Savings and Loans’. His nemesis, Mr Potter, is the cynical and self-serving owner of the local bank. Due to a moments bad fortune George goes to commit suicide but meets an angel who shows how the world would have been if he hadn’t been born and the Mr Potters of this world have won the day. Presciently this depiction closely resembles the one we know today. It’s not so much a tearjerker as a heart jerker, arousing it like a stroked cock into fortitude, and reminding me of values I seem to have been born with. It proves, unlike the common saying, that ‘joy is other people.’ One can search, insist and inveigle for what one wants, but if not for the benefit of others the product is just a veil in front of a banquet, an empty promise that the powerful endlessly pursue. But the heart shines like the light from the windows of a house and travels as far as whatever it falls on. When the shutters are closed it only illuminates the needs of the self. It seems in this age of moral cynicism we have accepted misery as a fact of life, as if happiness lies out there in pockets like ore in a gold mine that we need to prospect for, as if, no matter how we live, we might find it. We look inside for what we want and outside to get it. By now the house, shutters closed, is blindly banging round the universe hoping to bump into a gold bar. I ask myself, is it likely to happen? I also ask myself am I drowning in my own metaphors? Perhaps cynicism is a truth told too many times; perhaps we each only need to find it once.