Reaction to the movie: Pumpkin

It's about a girl from a well-to-do background, living a seemingly perfect life who falls in love with a mentally and physically retarded "challenged athlete". Although it is a nice movie, I must say that it is not realistic. The fact is that I see it over and over again: the rich invariably are limited in their social relations to the rich and the poor are restricted to the poor. You can see this trend throughout history across all societies and cultures. If you start out with a defect, there's just no reason why a person who is normal would choose the defective over the normal which is presumably readily available. Only if a normal relation is not possible will a normal person choose to associate with a handicap but if that is the case, then the normal person is probably not quite "normal" after all for if he was indeed normal, then he would be able to find a normal match. In short, it's a nice movie but in my opinion completely out of touch with reality. There's no reason whatsoever why Carolyn would fall in love with pumpkin!

The movie seems to highlight the euphoric attainment of perfection by anyone who applies himself adequately or simply gets lucky. However, as you already know, we don't believe in this. In our opinion there's no real choice in a person's life. Even if want to imagine that choices are possible, we must understand that the range of choices is extremely narrow compared to the total spectrum of possible choices. For example, a theorist would have said 10 years ago that if I succeeded in departing from Orthodox Judaism and go to college, it would be either a Jewish college such as YU or Touro or it will be a state/city sponsored college like BC/CUNY. Harvard is out of the question and so is the small private school out in Oklahoma. For the guy who lives in Oklahoma, the local college is an extremely likely possibility but BC is out of the question. In both cases it's just not practical for a person to attend certain kinds of colleges just like social and financial status are highly influenced from birth.

Dreaming of grandeur and quick riches is very pleasant and gratifying for some time but it's like Freudian defense mechanisms: it's soothing in the short run but disastrous in the long run. And that's because the person is creating an imaginary world around him, dodging real world issues and failing to develop the necessary skills to deal with those issues. Being realistic is always the best option when it comes to dealing effectively with the situation in the long run and the truth is sometimes painful.