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“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
The line is from the 1976 movie Network. The statement has been immortalized by the American Film Institute as one of the greatest movie lines in history, along with such memorable ones as “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” from Gone with the Wind, and “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse,” from The Godfather.
The film is about a TV news anchorman, Howard Beale (played by the late Peter Finch), who is fighting a losing battle, struggling to accept the social ills and widespread corruptions in the world he reports upon for a television network. Finch delivers the line when he is on the air ranting about and lamenting the sad state of the world, which no one seems to be doing anything about.
Peter Finch won an Academy Award for his performance (as did two of the other actors and the screenwriter), and the film was selected by the National Film Registry for preservation in the Library of Congress, as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” (A footnote to Finch’s Academy Award: he passed away before learning he had won for Best Actor.)
You might wonder why I am bringing up this seventies flick. Or, as Howard Beale put it in the movie, “What has that got to do with the price of rice?”
I am mad for many of the same reasons Howard Beale was—the ills of today’s world that most people feel helpless about are not that much different than those of the fictional world that sent Howard Beale into violent rants. The film reflects much about what’s wrong with our own society and about the people who are supposed to be doing something about the problems.
What grates me the most is that the people we rely upon, the ones we elect because they promise to deal with the problems, that we give the money and the power to so the problems can be fixed, are too often lazy, corrupt, incompetent—or just don’t care.
In the film, Beale says that everyone knows things are bad, that there’s a depression, people are out of work or scared of losing their job, the air’s unfit to breathe, the dollar’s deflated, shopkeepers keep guns under the counter, “and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
He believed that people should start changing the system by first getting mad.
Sound familiar? Maybe all the woes that bothered him aren’t exactly the same as they are today in our society, but they are close enough. And they are just as solvable, if our politicians and government leaders would do the jobs that they are well paid to do, instead of doing little while enjoying the fruits of our labors.
People say we need a change in Washington. They’re not talking about whatever political party happens to be in power at the moment but a change in which our country is governed efficiently and effectively instead of being an unmanageable bureaucracy that has collapsed under its own sheer weight.
We need new faces with good ideas, not the same old faces with the same old hackneyed game plans.
I believe the middle class is being eroded, being sold out for the sake of multinational corporations with globalist agendas. Part of this is being done through free trade agreements and outsourcing high-paying jobs offshore.
Our borders are so porous, so leaky, that we are flooded with millions of immigrants who can become a burden on our resources—with the burden being shifted to the taxpayers.
I’m not about to give you a laundry list of everything that needs to be fixed in America, because it would take up more space than a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but I do want to hit some high points that I have gleaned from experts, concerned callers, and my own experiences. I want to share some of my conclusions with you and hope that you will get as mad as I am and help me bring positive change.
Copyright © 2017 by George Noory
