Follow The Example Of Our Youth

I Give You the Next “Greatest Generation”
P. Scott Cummins © 2005 The Urbane R

This past week saw release of the Child Well-Being Index, an annual report from the Foundation for Child Development – which noted ten and twelve year lows among teens in pregnancies, alcohol abuse and criminal offenses. In response to this Jeffrey Butts, director of youth justice programs for the Urban Institute proclaimed: “Maybe we have the next ‘greatest generation’ coming along.” My response is to say emphatically: let’s drop the ‘maybe’ – because looking around there can be little doubt: today’s youth culture is the next “greatest generation” – and we have bellwether examples to celebrate right here in our community.

Youth culture has become an enormous positive influence in society. This is in no small part because the internet, online web logs (“blogs”) and other forms of communication allow high-achieving young people to find each other, be encouraged, challenged and fulfilled. Because of the web - you can meet-up, power-up and take off with a synergistic bounce.

The mark of prior generations has been ambition and drive in commerce and professions. Today, making one’s mark in youth culture is derived by no less ambition and drive – but through the power of ideas and creativity.

ActingOnAIDS asks: Do You See Orange?

Let me give you an example from right here in our own community. Making their homes on Queen Anne and Magnolia are three recent graduates of Seattle Pacific University. Last year they created a project called Acting on Aids – which is a powerful creative concept helping participants viscerally see and feel the impact of HIV/AIDS. The program is designed to encourage personal commitment and action in response to what the disease is doing to people worldwide. To make it all the more powerful, participants experience this from the perspective of the orphans AIDS leaves behind. Flash forward one year: Jackie Yoshimura, James Pedrick and Lisa Krohn have created a partnership with Federal Way-based World Vision - and brought the program out to over forty college campuses around the country.

Acting on AIDS takes elements of the 1960’s Civil Rights and Anti-War movements – reminiscent of teach-ins and campus theater - and applies it to frustration regarding the global AIDS pandemic and the virulent poverty which allows the disease to fester.

Jesse Harris (age 19) Motion Picture Director

And then there is Jesse Harris – who graduated from Seattle's Ballard High School last year – and now has the major motion picture “Living Life” set to premier this Friday April 8. As a sophomore Harris wrote the screenplay about a young man’s triumph in the face of terminal illness. By his senior year he had shot the movie, and used his own college funds to fund the project’s development. His film garnered an audience choice award from the Bay Area’s prestigious Orinda Film Festival. This led to a post-production and distribution contract - with a major Hollywood movie distributor. And that brings us to this coming weekend, the most important weekend of Jesse Harris’ life: when his movie will officially debut at the Landmark Metro Cinema in the University District.

Which is where this all started: why is it that a teenager in Seattle can write, hire a cast and production team, direct, and then shepherd the release of a major motion picture? Of course Jesse Harris is a rare and talented individual. And there is a team of talented collaborators, such as Seattle's John Jeffcoat of Strangelife Productions, who provided “big budget” quality as film editor on Living Life. And Harris, true to form, credits the skill and mentoring of his collaborators for making the project successful.

But that underscores the point: that many talented and experienced movie professionals allowed a teenager to be in charge. I spent four hours with Harris this past weekend: he would strike you as any nineteen year old might. True, Harris exudes a complex mixture of friendly confidence and laser-like ability to focus. And he measures his responses like a seasoned diplomat. But his normal teenager-becoming-a-man characteristics are all there as well. So what is it? I can see it in Jesse Harris: he has tapped into the power of creativity and ideas. Get in touch with that, and all the rest (including the big business elements of a Hollywood movie) will follow.

In Living Life, seventeen year old Jason Miller (played by Benjamin P. Garman in what looks to be a breakout role) learns he is dealing with a very serious metastasized late-stage neuroblastoma (abdominal) cancer. His grandfather (movingly portrayed by veteran film actor Dick Arnold) has been estranged from the family for many years – but because of his grandson’s grave illness, insists on spending time with him. In a beautiful scene done on a rowboat in Green Lake, Jason asks his grandfather:

“Have you ever wanted to do something really great for a person, something wonderful that actually affects their lives?”

This theme underscores the entire movie. Harris admits that at film festivals and test screenings “people tell me, like in their twenties and thirties, that it (the movie) changed the way they think. People are relating to loss, to family, to what this all means for them personally. I’m not like a religious person. And the film does not come off as preachy. But all of a sudden the message just hits.”

And people are deeply moved. “I want people thinking about it, talking about it” Harris admits. And people tell him in thinking about encountering crisis in their lives “they learned how to react, and what they would do based on the movie.”

This movie is deeply spiritual because it underscores that value in life comes from opening up to love: the capacity to love and be loved. This theme, in a major motion picture made by a Seattle teenager, provides ample signs we have found our next “greatest generation.”

The decision on whether to give Living Life a wide national release will be based in no small part on how many of us see the movie over the next two weeks at Seattle’s Landmark Metro Cinemas - www.landmarktheaters.com What better way to show our support for all that can be good in society than to get behind a special film by an important new director? See you at the movies.

For tickets and movie times at the Landmark Metro Cinema in Seattle's University District, click here.

Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers -
in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.
1 Timothy 4:12