Of "Precious"

I saw the movie "Precious (which has a longer title, but it's generally known as this)" the other night. Powerful, but certainly not in an uplifting way.

There isn't a thing Precious Jones has going in her life that can be called hopeful. She's terribly overweight. She has an abusive mother who stays home, lives on welfare, and screams at her for little or no reason; Precious cooks for her and it had better be done right and on time.

She has an unwanted child by her mother's boyfriend and is pregnant with his second. She is HIV-positive. She is 16.

What's just as devastating: She can't read. There may just be a way out of this cauldron for her, but not if she can't put her mind to work.

Precious' struggles, and their eventual outcome, are not the stuff of easy viewing. It's Harlem in 1987, and sadly, it has the feel of a timelessness in that all someone's efforts have been futile. It could be the early 21st Century, for all we know. It could be elsewhere. It could be thousands.

And with the economy in its precarious state, how can we possibly look to raise this situation, and so many others like it, if we can't, or won't, put the funding into public education?

The mentality has gone in reverse: We need, not to prove why this is necessary, but to prove that the public at large has some responsibility for it. This is a perversion of the American Dream (actually, the human dream; go back to Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence to verify) that, disappointingly, has us cutting our own throats.

Who shows Precious the way through, that she has something going for her? A teacher. It is in her school that Precious makes a few friends, develops a support system, and knows that someone cares.

That will never surprise me. But, having been thrown out of the basic school system, she lands in a special school in which attention can be paid to her and others with challenging backgrounds.

In another twenty years, as we continue, will that funding be there for such situations? Or will someone, some Milton Friedman, simply conclude that the free market will find its own way to provide?

We do not know how it will end for Precious, or did. Look around you, New York; Los Angeles; Milwaukee; Chicago (where more than two dozen school-related murders have already happened this school year); Miami; Philadelphia; and the like. They are there.

What a waste of talent. What a waste of humanity. What a bottom-dragging anchor for our way of life.

And for every Precious who finds a way through--precarious as it still is at the conclusion of the film--how many are there who can't and will never have the one, last opportunity she had?

Mister Mark