Change the World

This past weekend as I relaxed and recovered from what seems like weeks of traveling, I popped in the DVD “Pay It Forward” (2000).

Young Trevor McKinney (Haley Joel Osment) responds to an assignment from his teacher (Kevin Spacey) with a plan to help three people … who will help three more, and so on, in an ever-widening circle. Trevor touches more people than he expected in director Mimi Leder’s gentle drama: his abused mother Arlene (Helen Hunt), his physically and emotionally scarred teacher and a journalist who hears of the plan and starts investigating.

Although little Haley Joel Osment of “I see dead people” fame got on my nerves after awhile, he did a great job as a truly soul-filled kid who honestly believes he can change the world. His character Trevor is blown away by a teacher’s bonus assignment to think about a way to change the world and then put it into action. How his consciousness begins to change as well as the consciousness of people around him is truly amazing and the heart of the story. The rest of the drama swirling around this key message gets a bit weepy and exaggerated at times, but the message is compelling enough that the excess drama is tolerable.

The character Trevor is told the seemingly impossible: that he can change the world. As he’s riding his bicycle home after school, he passes an area where people who are very poor live. Trevor realizes that he can do something about it by bringing one person home, feeding him, and letting him sleep in the garage. When asked by the man how he can repay him, Trevor tells him to pay it forward: help three other people and tell them to do the same when they ask how they can repay the kindness.

In the novel Pay It Forward which inspired the film, Trevor explains:

“You see, I do something real good for three people. And then when they ask how they can pay it back, I say they have to Pay It Forward. To three more people. Each. So nine people get helped. Then those people have to do twenty-seven.” He turned on the calculator, punched in a few numbers. “Then it sort of spreads out, see. To eighty-one. Then two hundred forty-three. Then seven hundred twenty-nine. Then two thousand, one hundred eighty-seven. See how big it gets?” (source)

Catherine Ryan Hyde, the author of the novel Pay It Forward, created quite a book in that she embedded within fiction a plan of action to help others out of kindness and without expectation of reimbursement. Since writing the book, Hyde and others have started the Pay It Forward Foundation “to educate and inspire students to realize that they can change the world, and provide them with opportunities to do so.”

I am pleased to know that the “pay it forward” concept is not just fiction, but that there are people out there who are trying to put this into practice. I think we all struggle with the knowledge that things in the world and in our own neighborhood are not as they should be. Yet we feel powerless to do anything about it or we feel like there is a chasm between “us” and “them”. Children are often much more adept at crossing lines because they don’t see the chasm or the boundaries. They’ve not grown old enough to construct all kinds of social/cultural/political/emotional barriers like we adults do. Jesus’ simple request that we become like little children was indeed loaded when looked at from this perspective.

Have you ever felt like you could change the world? What did you do or, what stopped you? Is there some need right in your own neighborhood that you could address, even if in a small way?

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Tagged as: book, kindness, movie, pay it forward