Because I had to stay home Tuesday to over the installation of our fiber optic ISP I has the rare chance to go see a late film at the theaters on Monday night. Hidden Figures is a historical drama about the early days of the space program when we strapped men to rockets and launched them into space with the figure worked out with pencil and paper.

Figures that it turns out were worked by a group talented, dedicated, and unsung of African-American women. Told through the point of view of three women, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson, the movie is a rocket ride of emotions.

Set in the early 1960s the film I think strikes exactly the right tone in capturing the racial injustice of the era. There aren’t characters hurling crude and insulting insults using verboten words, but rather the film captured the daily indignities the are principally unquestioned by most of the white characters. The grace, intelligence, and perseverance shown by the three women are levels of maturity I doubt I will ever achieve.

As a writer there are plenty of things that can be learned from the screenplay. One lesson I think is that simple human dignity is a high enough stake for your drama. It would have been easy to further fictionalize the story by maker some of the secondary character more militant, a militancy that would not be without cause, but the truth is this story had all the drama it needs.

One of the principal emotions that swept through me as I watched was anger. Of course it’s is no great thing to be anger at the racism and injustice, at the betrayal of the nation’s ideals, but I also became enraged over the waste then and today.

A nation is only as great as its people. To waste human potential is to throw away a nation’s most valuable resource. The human capital it what drives innovation, growth, and invention. Not simply in the areas of science and technology, but in the arts, in ethics, in government. To make our nation stronger, richer, wiser, and better we need people who can do that. I weep thinking about the geniuses we shall never utilize because a foolish shortsightedness.

Is Hidden Figures Oscar™ bait? After last year’s diversity controversy I don’t doubt that in part this film was approved and produced to answer those charges, and it has all the hallmarks of a movie made for the award season, but that takes nothing away from the power of the story, the talent of the filmmkaers, the emotional heft of the performances, and the importance of the themes.