Bewitched, and Being Normal

I watched the Nicole Kidman movie Bewitched. It was good and funny, though I found it was too short, there were lots of cool secondary characters who were not given time at all. And the story was rather abbreviated, for example one moment Nicole's girlfriends don't know she is a witch, the next they do and act like they have known and accepted it all their lives. A bit weird. But nice little romantic comedy.
And it showed some scenes from the original TV show, which seemed charming, so I rented that.
It's very good and funny. Elizabeth Montgomery is balls-out hot. And cool.
By the way, did anybody see the show originally? Was it in color or B/W? Because when I see clips of it, it's in B/W. But the show on the DVD I rented is in color. And if they colorized it, they've done a marvelous job.
... OK, I just looked it up on IMDb.com... it was black and white for the first three years. Awesome job that colorization, not once have I noticed anything unnatural about it, and I'm a photographer.

Her husband Darrin in the show is a First Class idiot. He's got a wife who is stunning, who loves him, they have a great sex life (made surprisingly clear for a sixties sitcom), and she is a witch! And he does not appreciate her. He keeps trying to get her to stop witchcraft! She can make food and trees and furniture in a split second just by wishing it. What a gift. And here both him and her are perfectly willing to throw it away to be "normal." I can't express my disdain for such idiocy.

It would be fine if it was "just a TV show," but it reflects a huge tendency in humans: the desire to fit in is so strong that they will throw away the use of huge, god-given gifts to have it.

I think this is not as bad as it was fifty years ago, when "being normal" was the be-all and end-all of everything. But there is still a feeling in many that if you use Special Powers, you are somehow "cheating" and it's nor "fair" to ordinary humans. It's self-oppression is what it is. Isn't your duty to yourself, to the universe and to God bigger than your duty to a few accidental humans in your community, who would rather see you brought down to their level than have you use your potential?

Featured comment by Lucid Twilight:
It is fear that is our greatest foe, and furthermore the fear of being afraid. Normalcy is a safe alternative to the life we could be living, albeit a dull experience at its best. People do not concern themselves enough with the quality of their lives and focus too much on the quantity of years.

When all we did was work and sleep and mate, this was acceptable. We lived as unthinking creatures of habit that did what was necessary to survive, distracting ourselves with complaints towards the upper classes when we did have a spare moment to ourselves. Life, as it is now, simply could not be better (in comparison to what we've known) and herein lies the problem: we have too much freedom, too much time, too few distractions. That which we desire is within our grasp and there's no longer enough to divert our attention from ourselves and the things that really matter in life, but we're afraid to delve within and sort these things out. If the world keeps changing and we keep resisting, something will break sooner or later. But if we instead rid ourselves of fear and tread boldly into this new territory I firmly believe it will bring about a golden age unlike anything we've ever seen on earth.

It is perhaps the greatest irony that we think to be safe that which is most detrimental to ourselves. It's understandable, having lived in a self-destructive manner for so long. (Safety in the familiar) And now we stand upon the threshold with two possibilities laid before us: we can move beyond this destructive phase or we can reset the clock, so to speak, and send ourselves back into the dark ages. That isn't to say these are the only two possibilities, but they are in my mind the most prominent. The question is how long it will be before a decision is reached and acted upon. We might even go a hundred years or more relatively unchanged, but there are subtle imperceptible energies at work. I'm not talking about anything sinister like conspiracy theories (load of bollocks they are) but the natural forces, seen and unseen, which are constantly at work around us, things we often direct without consciously realizing it. The face of humankind will be altered, it's just a matter of how and in what way.