I finally watched Meryl Streep’s acceptance speech for her Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes.
Wow…
If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it or read it.
It’s powerful. And so important.
It’s also heartwarming and inspiring to see someone use their position and privilege to make such important statements about what’s going on in the world and our responsibilities to each other.
In her speech, she makes reference to (and pokes fun at the outcome of) xenophobia. She reminds us that actors’ are meant to enter the lives of other people so that we can experience what those lives are like.
Having just seen Fences, for example, I’m reminded that the power of that ability to raise awareness, create understanding, and build connections across difference is huge.
And then she made mention of the way Donald Trump imitated a disabled reporter and the deep impact that had on her – because it wasn’t a movie, it was real.
She called out so many important things about that event, including the imbalance of “power, privilege, and the capacity to fight back”, but the thing that impacted me the most was when she said: “this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.”
Blam
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