Movies.  That’s my secret.  When faced with a long plane ride, what I most depend on to pass the time are movies.

Earlier this month I traveled to Tokyo.  One movie I turned to was A Star is Born, the recent remake staring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper.  I gave it a whirl for a couple of reasons.

First, Shannon was talking about it.  Second, it featured the song writing of Jason Isbell, of whom I’m a fan.  Shannon and I had the opportunity to see him headline one evening of Hinterland in the little town of St Charles, Iowa this summer.  It was the best concert I’d ever seen.

The song he wrote for the movie is called, “Maybe It’s Time.”  He played it that night, and I guess it rooted its way into my brain.  At the time I thought it was a song about personal growth.

Somewhere halfway through the flight to Tokyo, just coming off the tip of Alaska, I got to the crux of the movie.  To say I found the moment depressing would be an understatement.  It hung over me overseas, and I find it something I still brush up against today.

I thought the storyline would parallel Isbell’s own experience, himself a recovering alcoholic.  Instead, Cooper’s character seems to end all hope of a future because he doesn’t believe he can escape his past.  Isbell’s song found a much darker meaning.

Now enter Carson King and the Des Moines Register.

King has raise somewhere around $1.5 million dollars for the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital.  It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a college student.  Most of us will never do anything like it.

The Register certainly helped promote the story.  Then their efforts to expose offensive social media posts King made when he was 16 got them in the midst of a public relations nightmare.  Many have removed the Register from their social media feeds.  The reporter of the story has now had his own past Twitter posts come to light.

If you must direct your disgust, try and keep it to the Register.  The paper has a staff who are meant to act as an intermediary between a reporter and their story and the public.  Repeating the missteps of the reporter doesn’t absolve us from making the same mistake.  Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.

I hope you also direct yourselves to something affirming.  You can donate to Stead Family Children’s Hospital.  You can contribute to King’s fund.  If you do so, I’d mention an often untold part of what your dollars will do.

You are going to help give the kids an opportunity to make their own bad decisions.  To end relationships in crappy ways, to be ignorant or insensitive to the people around them, and to spend years convinced of things that simply aren’t so.  That’s part of what it looks like to grow up.

As they grow up, they will hopefully discover what we might someday discover:  our undignified moments can be part of a dignified life.  They shouldn’t keep us from working good in the world, and they shouldn’t let us get in the way of others doing so.  Someday, if we can find that true for ourselves, maybe we can find it true for others too.