Ideas for a better world in 2011

In many ways, 2010 is a year you may want to relegate to the filing cabinet quickly. It began with a massive earthquake in Haiti and wound down with North Korea once again being an enfant terrible – bizarrely trying to conduct diplomacy through brinkmanship.

In between came Toyota recalls and egg scares, pat downs at airports and unyielding unemployment numbers, too little money in the Irish treasury and too many bedbugs in American sheets. Oil gushed from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico for three months, mocking the best intentions of man and technology to stop it, while ash from a volcano in Iceland darkened Europe temporarily as much as its balance sheets.

Yet not all was gloomy. The winter Olympics in Canada and the World Cup in South Africa dazzled with their displays of athletic prowess and national pride, becoming hearths around which the world gathered. In Switzerland, the world's largest atom smasher hurled two protons into each other at unfathomable speeds. Then came the year's most poignant moment – the heroic and improbable rescue of 33 miners from the clutches of the Chilean earth.

There were many transitions, too – the return of the Republicans in Washington and the Tories in Britain, the scaling back of one war (Iraq) and the escalation of another (Afghanistan), the fall of some powers (Greece) and rise of others (China, Germany, Lady Gaga).

To get the new year off to the right start, we decided to ask various thinkers for one idea each to make the world a better place in 2011. We plumbed poets and political figures, physicists and financiers, theologians and novelists. Some of the ideas are provocative, others quixotic. Some you will agree with, others you won't. But in the modest quest to stir a discussion – from academic salons to living rooms to government corridors – we offer these 25 ideas.

John Kehe/Staff
This is the cover story of the Dec. 27 weekly issue of the Christian Science Monitor.

Naomi Foner

NAOMI FONER, screenwriter who was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988 for "Running on Empty." Her other screenwriting credits include "Losing Isaiah," "A Dangerous Woman," and "Bee Season."

Idea: Reinvent Hollywood heroes

Ms. Foner writes: No good art is made without the space to fail. Our culture has become risk averse as the economy as slowed. Certainly the movie business has.

The more expensive your movie is, the less likely you will be allowed to take any risk. So instead of many smaller movies, with a range of subjects, some of which take risks and question authority, we have a few monsters that question nothing. And it's not just movies: books, music, art, everything's moved to the great middle.

I remember movies opening the world for me, showing me people and places and possibilities I would never have known. Our job as filmmakers, as artists of any kind, is to "disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed." We need to take risks. We won't survive as a culture without it.

Sometimes it is history that pushes us to such risks. "Angels in America" and "The Diary of Anne Frank" were hugely transformational – iconic – for their era. If you move people, they will think about what they have seen.

We are in such a time again. We need heroes, we need heroines. We need to allow our women to grow old with grace instead of disappearing from our screens. We need to give voice to our immigrant underground. We need to show that questioning authority is the highest form of patriotism.

Movies have done that: Paul Newman as Cool Hand Luke and Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. Heroes take risks. We need them again.

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