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Personal Responsibility: "Winter's Bone"

Guest post by: Michael Hume

Article Overview: If you're struggling with your confidence, or feeling victimized by your circumstances, I saw a movie over the weekend I can heartily recommend: "Winter's Bone." It should make you appreciate your lot in life.

Personal Responsibility: "Winter's Bone"

A Triumph Over Victimhood If you're struggling with your confidence, or feeling victimized by your circumstances, I saw a movie over the weekend I can heartily recommend: "Winter's Bone."

It should make you appreciate your lot in life.

Here's the review: "Winter's Bone" is bleak, but atmospheric (the sun never shines, creating a nearly-oppressive sense of grayness and despair)... the story is familiar, but compelling and just twisted enough to keep your attention... the acting is mean, but perfect. I will leave it up to others to determine whether the show is award material. What struck me about the movie was that it was able to present yet another strong case for whatever it is in the human spirit that can triumph over seemingly-overwhelming temptation to lapse into an attitude of victimhood. I call it "entrepreneurship," but that's just me.

The lead character is a 17-year-old girl who finds herself running the household in a shack in the Ozarks; her father has abandoned the family, her mother has withdrawn inside herself and ceased to function, and there are two grade-school siblings that need to be cared for. The law is looking for her daddy, who signed over the entire family property for his bail bond before disappearing. She has a week to find him, or the family loses everything.

The girl turns out to be doggedly persistent in the pursuit of a resolution... I won't spoil it for you. My point is that there were a dozen key moments in the story at which it would have been easier to give up, to play the victim, to let the neighbors or Social Services Department step in and solve the problem. But the girl never gives in. She sets about solving several problems at once, from finding her father to teaching her little brother and sister how to feed themselves in case she is the next one to turn up missing.

In this movie, the girl is the hero. It made me think there are heroes in every family, and indeed, there's a hero in each of us, fighting it out with the victim that's in each of us as well. We are all living a story in which there are lots of opportunities either to triumph or to be defeated. None of us goes undefeated, but it's beautiful when the wins outnumber the losses. The harder the fight, the beautiful it is.

I recommend the movie, and I hope you'll watch it with a view toward your own life - which, though undoubtedly very different from this teenager's, is not without its own challenges. Perhaps all of our lives' challenges exist purely to serve as a call to action to the entrepreneur inside us... the hero to rise up and conquer the victim mentality that pervades too much of our society.

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Article Tags: count your blessings, inspirational leadership, personal responsibility, successful entrepreneurs



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