Redemption Road

I recently saw the trailer for the upcoming Will Smith movie, Emancipation, about a runaway slave in the 1800’s desperately fleeing from the plantation owners who tried to kill him. The clip was included in an article on social media announcing the film. Against my better judgement, I started reading some of the comments…

-I’ll never EVER see anything associated with Will Smith again, wish he’d do us all a favor and just disappear forever.

-This movie actually looks great. It’s a shame that Smith is the star and not someone else, because normally I’d be all over this. But nah I’m good.

-Fuck Will Smith!”

There were some positive comments mixed in but most were slamming him, many of them vulgarly.

We all have our reasons to like or dislike someone and I respect the opinion of others, but I’ve had a little different take regarding Smith since the infamous slap at the Oscars earlier this year.

It seems that overnight, most people felt the same as those quoted above. Prior to the incident, I didn’t know anyone (or hadn’t heard of anyone) who absolutely hated Will Smith. Just the opposite actually. For the longest time, he was widely considered one of the good guys in Hollywood; 0ver-the-top talented and someone who, for the most part seemed to be a good family man and kept it real. In recent years, he made many short motivational videos, encouraging people to not give up on their dreams. He was one of the biggest box office stars in the world and yet still seemed in touch with his own humanity and that of others.

I won’t delve into the relationship problems the Smith family had / has. All I’ll say is that an open marriage isn’t a marriage at all, as far as I’m concerned. The argument could be made that Smith invited the pain he was feeling, in the months leading up to that ill-fated night.

Being in pain, having a hurting soul, doesn’t justify his actions but it seems that was the backdrop Smith was coming from when he tried to smack Chris Rock’s face right off his head. There’s zero excuse for it. Comedians often say things that are considered offensive, and Smith should’ve anticipated and rolled with the moment. But he didn’t.

He lost his shit on national TV with millions of people watching.

So what’s the difference between someone like Will Smith, and you or I?

Welllll aside from our bank balance, the most obvious is that he’s a global celebrity and the cameras were rolling when he had his moment. Truth is, we’ve all lost our shit at times, multiple times. Sometimes justified and sometimes maybe not so much, but even so – hopefully we’ve learned something about ourselves each time, and hopefully it happens less frequently than when we were younger. For most of us, it probably still happens occasionally. Life’s brutal sometimes and of course, we all come from a place of our own pain too.

There’s a quote from the late Stephen Covey that seems pretty relevant –

“We judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.”

If you think about that longer than 2 seconds, it’ll cut straight to the heart. It’s true, we’re all guilty of this. It’s ridiculously easy to judge someone for their actions, isn’t it?

How’d ya like to be forever condemned / judged by others for a single event in your life?

Disclaimer: sometimes, peoples’ actions are exactly who they are. They don’t try changing their behavior and they just don’t give two fucks. There are some sour apples in the world who don’t deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt. In these cases, we’d do best to just avoid them altogether.

Then there are people who genuinely try to change.

This is another one that should cut to the heart too. We’re all guilty of holding someone’s past against them, sometimes regardless of how much they’ve worked on themselves. And of course, others have done that with us.

I don’t care how anyone else feels about Will Smith. But as for myself, I get the feeling he’s been doing some serious soul-searching, has been genuinely remorseful, and has been doing the work so that he can get his personal life back on track

I’m looking forward to seeing the movie – it looks very poignant, and according to the trailer is “inspired by a true story” from a very dark time in our history.

-Mike