Pay It Forward

Two days ago, I happened to catch on a movie entitled Pay It Forward on HBO. It stars Haley whatsisname, the child star on Bruce Willis' The Sixth Sense who immortalized the lines "I can see dead people". With him is Helen Hunt, Jon Bon Jovi and the remarkable Kevin Spacey. I've always been smitten by the subtle and powerful performances of Kevin Spacey since I saw K-PAX. However, I am equally impressed by this Haley boy who gained my well-deserved respect after this movie.

Haley plays a 7th-grader raised in a broken home with a mom who's a recovering alcoholic and is seldom home. Spacey plays his school teacher who inspired him to develop a Pay It Forward principle. By virtue of this principle, a person is required to do one big and extraordinary good deed to three people. Those three people have to pay it forward meaning they also have to do good deeds to three other people each. It is a rather ambitious endeavor, relying purely on a person's goodwill. And as such, failure will ultimately be its end.

Pardon my apathy. In real lfe, something like this will never happen. Doing something great for someone you perhaps do not know at all may perhaps be noticed and lauded by society, but more often than not it will be forgotten, shaken off as a happenstance that won't happen again, or not recognized at all. As part of the Filipino culture, doing a great deed for someone requires him, by virtue of utang-na-loob or indebtedness, to pay you back in kind. Failure to do this will deem him an ingrate, a leech, someone who doesn't know how to look back from where he came from. If you are the doer of the great good deed to someone without asking for something in return just a wish that he also pay it forward to someone else, you will be considered a showoff, a fool, a politician in the making, a naive creep, or someone who attaches strings to everything. It is a hopeless scenario if you ask me.

Inspite of it all, however, there is nothing wrong in hoping. There is nothing wrong in having faith in people. There is nothing wrong in believing that people do apply their better nature. Naive as it may seem, sometimes we don't have to make things all that complicated. Only adult minds make things complicated. At the end of the day, we all have to contribute if we want to make this cruel world less cruel may it be in deeds and dreams that may seem miniscule compared to what rich philantropists do. It doesn't matter. As long as we have faith, we all have the potential to make life suck less to ourselves and to other people. Though this sunshine disposition is usually out of my league, today at least it is in.