The prompt today is “One Thing I Think Everyone Should Know,” and I’ll get there in a minute.

First, last night I watched this documentary on Max called “Last Stop Larrimah,” about a missing (likely murdered) man in Larrimah, Australia. Larrimah had 11 residents, now it has 10, and no one knows who did it or why. Anyone could have done it, all 11 simultaneously liked and hated each other. But the review I sort of read referenced the often blurry line between telling a story and making fun of the subjects. The Larrimanians, well, they live in a town of 11 in Australia, so they’re quirky and odd. They are not like the people we see at the Whole Foods or high school basketball games.

I finished Birdman this morning, which plays like a documentary of the making of a Broadway play. It isn’t a doc, it’s fiction, and it won an Oscar several years ago. Birdman sounds/looks exactly like a movie I would LOOOOVE, except that it wasn’t. I didn’t like it at all. The performances were outstanding, especially Edward Norton’s, but left me standing in my living room, wondering why I felt nothing at all but sad. The story was, more or less, about the artifice of the industry – the only things that were real was the insecurity and desperate need for validation. Maybe they were on the other side of that same line, maybe they were making fun of their subjects, too. Maybe it was intentional.

An awful lot of things, on film and IRL, walk that line. We all carry that insecurity & desperation, we all have our quirks and personalities. As we walk around, feeling the friction of others who are nothing like us (or who are too much like us), how do we respond? Are our emotions and judgments celebration of another’s unique strangeness or are we laughing at the labels we place on them, labels that obscure their hearts but emphasize everything else.

I liked Last Stop Larrimah, and didn’t like Birdman, for pretty much the same reason: I really love people. This isn’t always an easy position to take, there is always violence and evil. There is never a shortage of examples of inhumanity. But in the face of the never ending avalanche of mistreatment and de-valuation, we simply have to persevere. Otherwise, those examples will continue, ad infinitum.

Birdman didn’t like it’s characters, and thats ok, I suppose. They didn’t, either. This tension between who they were and who they thought they should be or who they were trying to prove they were drove every plot point. Their self-loathing motivated every twist and turn. And I can’t help but think the critic who viewed Larrimah through the lens of ‘otherness is less, which makes it a punchline’ felt the same. He (or she) wanted them to be like us, cool and oh-so sophisticated, with the same hopes, dreams, decor and jeans. Wanted them saddled with the same self-loathing – and when they didn’t wear that on the outside, he branded them with it.

So, what do I want everyone to know? That we are amazing and wonderful. That we don’t have to be any of the should’s, that we don’t have anything to prove, that we don’t have to live like that for another second. That differences are just the best. That there’s nothing to make fun of, there’s nothing to mock. That we are who we are, and that is so much more than good enough. That’s what I want everyone to know.