Mad as Hell Speech delivered by “Howard Beale”
As the economy struggles to bounce back and thousands of people are losing their jobs everyday while wall street bonuses are predicted to exceed $145,000,000,000, are Americans finally ready to scream “ENOUGH”?!
Mad as Hell
Howard Beale
Network
1976
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!
JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, a few friends were having dinner wondering what personal actions they could take to help limit the power of the big banks and create a more sane, stable financial system.
The filmmaker at the table reminded the others of the story told in the classic film It’s A Wonderful Life — a tale about a small banker, played by Jimmy Stewart, who almost gets crushed by a big banker. In the end, though, the community rallies around the small bank and helps save it.
Three days later, the filmmaker made a short video.
Since that first dinner the idea has spread like wildfire.
This site was set up as a modest home for the effort. A seed. But the idea will only have an impact if others keep it going from here.
How? For starters, you could move your money to a small bank.
There is no official organization here. It’s a volunteer project. If you have ideas about how this idea can grow, send us a note and we’ll display the best ideas in the Comments section of the site.
We hope this idea will continue to spread in a thousand different ways.
Thanks for whatever you can do.
We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!
I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.
You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,
"I'm as mad as hell,
and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"
