Seeing from the blind side

I read a story the other day about a boy from the projects. No daddy, in and out of foster care. He’d been killed in a gunfight. In the last paragraph, they talk about his superb athletic skills and how different his life might have been if he hadn’t fallen behind and dropped out of school. He was 21 years old the day he died. It was his birthday. That could have been anyone. That could have been my son, Michael.”

So goes the last lines of the movie, The Blind Side, a true story based on the life of American football player Michael Oher. The person speaking in the previous paragraph was not Michael Oher’s real mother, it was Leigh Anne Tuohy (played by Sandra Bullock in the movie) a socialite from Tennessee, who decides to adopt Michael when she sees him drenched in the rain, wearing only cut-off jeans and a T-shirt. Michael had previously been entered into a private school due to his immense size and potential to be an athletic asset to Briarcrest Christian High School. Michael’s prominent size and skin color soon make him an object of pitiful gossip among teachers, classmates and parents. Seeing Michael’s condition, Leigh Anne cannot bear the thought of looking away from a person who clearly needs help. She decides to shelter Michael in her house, and welcome him, later on, into her family.

Changing the life of a person who has experienced poverty and suffering cannot be simply solved by providing for his basic needs. The morning after the Touhys take him in, Michael decides to run away. Being a feisty lady, Leigh Anne runs after Mike and persuades him to celebrate Thanksgiving with her family. It takes a long time before Leigh Anne is finally able to make Michael open up to the Tuohys. In her own words, she remarks that she hugged Michael for one year before Michael ever hugged him back. The movie shows us that Michael is not the sole beneficiary of Leigh Anne’s act of kindness; when a friend remarked that Leigh Anne was changing Michael’s life, she responded wisely, “No, he’s changing mine.”

Unlike other movies that show poor people reversing their fortune with the help of other people, The Blind Side is very realistic as it shows the different facets of Michael’s life. All scenes provide an explanation for what seems to be the passive mentality of poor people: a clear lack of a support system. Or in Michael’s own words, “the feeling of not being wanted or needed.” In one scene, Michael is said to have written a paragraph complaining about his teachers at his new school. “They expect me to do homework on my own. I have never done a single homework in my life.” Teachers, myself included, are indeed guilty of putting more pressure on a life already teetering on the edge of survival, without providing any help or encouragement.

One of the most heartbreaking scenes of the movie is Leigh Anne’s visit to Michael’s real mother. Immediately, the audience sees that Michael’s mother is not herself when she meets Leigh Anne. She is a drug addict and her children were taken away from her because of her condition and hazardous lifestyle. When Leigh Anne asks her about Michael’s birth certificate and father, she replies by sobbing painfully and admitting that she does not have the papers Leigh Anne was looking for. Worse, she doesn’t even know who Michael’s father was.

The scene elicits a shock of recognition to all who work in jobs that serve the poor. It just goes to show that whatever race or culture one belongs to, suffering from extreme poverty has the same dehumanizing effect: a dysfunctional family, which in turn causes the child to suffer from lack of trust, commitment and a healthy self-esteem. With this kind of life, students like Michael Oher have a hard time focusing their life on a goal and sadly, this is when society judges them to be unworthy of help, and worse, deserving of their unjust fate.

What, then, does it take for an impoverished person to make it in this dog-eat-dog world? The movie offers a suggestion. When Michael Oher is asked how he was able to get out of the lifestyle of people in the “projects,” he gives a simple answer: “When I was little, and something awful was happening, my mom would tell me to close my eyes. And when the bad things were over, (she told me to) open my eyes, past is gone, the world is a good place, it’s all gonna be okay.”

People with a secure identity might say this is an escapist approach to solving a problem. And there is some truth to that. After all, this was the ploy of Oher’s mother to prevent her kids from seeing that she was doing drugs. However, the youth out there who suffer from intolerable pain and affliction might be able to gain something valuable from forgetting their misery and waiting instead for a better world to happen. Even Leigh Ann Tuohy used the same strategy when he kept on “peeling Michael Oher one layer at a time.”

The song over the closing credits of The Blind Side goes: “Chances are, when all is done, who’d be the lucky ones to make it all the way?”

Perhaps it is those who close their eyes and continue to dream that it’s still a beautiful world and a life worth living.