Blessed

We saw The Fighter yesterday.  GREAT movie.  It's an amazing story of overcoming incredible odds to accomplish great things.  I'm fascinated by people like Micky Ward who push through such seemingly insurmountable odds to achieve their goals.  I'm sure that most anyone who has achieved great things has had to work hard and has probably made sacrifices along the way, but it's my opinion that some are faced with much greater adversity than others.

Today I watched the documentary referenced in the movie about Dicky Eklund, the protagonist's brother.  It's about crack use in Lowell MA, a small industrial town with high unemployment and bad socioeconomics.  Those profiled in the doc are crack-heads of the worst kind.  Missing teeth, hazy eyes, weird skin color...junkies.  They coherently and articulately explain how crack is destroying their life and ruining their future, and how they wish they had never started using it.  In the next breath they go on to explain how they love it more than "anything in the world."  It's hard to believe anyone could ever extract themselves from that sort of situation and get back to any sense of normalcy.  

I know there are a lot of bad decisions made to get some to the point of those profiled in the movie.  However, there are also those who are born into bad situations.  Abusive homes, addicted parents, regions with no access to education or geopolitical stability.  And yet out of each of the aforementioned environments incredible people emerge, Nelson Mandela for example.  

It occurred to me as I began to think of instances where individuals overcame incredible odds to achieve uncommon success, that in every case there is a person or people who help to pull these unlikely victors from their seemingly helpless station and buoy them up.  It made me wonder, as someone who lives a life of comparative ease, am I one of those lifting my brother...?