Courtesy of The Epoch Times.
By Michael Wing
Keanu Reeves isn’t the only nice guy in Hollywood. We still have Tom Hanks.
Instinctively, we all need someone to look up to in life. We want to believe that there are good people out there, that at least someone among us remains untainted by money or greed, morally solid, a rock.
So, it’s comforting to know that while Reeves was busy making secret contributions to find a cure for cancer and handing over millions of his own earnings to “The Matrix” movie special effects crew, and while he was riding the subway instead of a private helicopter, he isn’t the only one.
Tom Hanks is also in our midst, donating to charities and doing good wherever he goes, to everyone he meets. Even though he’s quiet about the good things that he does and isn’t looking to attach his name to anything, we end up finding out about it anyway; word percolates out from cab drivers who have incredible run-ins with the actor and end up getting invited by him to a Broadway show; or an actress who saw Hanks’ sweet interaction with a fan who is autistic ends up spilling the story to a magazine. Tom Hanks is the real deal, we learn, and it makes us feel good.
And we haven’t even touched on his movies yet!
The actor has starred in such films as “Forest Gump,” “Apollo 13,” and “Saving Private Ryan.” Hanks tends to fall back on a sort of small-town, 20th century mores that somehow we always find reassuring. But he does it so well that it’s timeless. He is a genuine person, and he makes us believe in it, too.
“Making a movie is a life experience that can create an awful lot of joy,” says the actor to Mercury News. “You can meet the person you fall in love with, you can laugh your heads off, you can make the best friend you’ve ever had, you can work with one of your heroes. That’s the good stuff that can happen on a movie.”
Hanks’s contributions to charity are hardly an afterthought to who he is either. There are over 31 different organizations across the globe that he supports. These include charities that help abused or seriously ill children through summer camps or music and the arts. The Elevate Hope Foundation and Hole In The Wall Gang are two.
He contributes to groups that help military vets and families find caregivers as well, like the Elizabeth Dole Foundation. He supports a group that aims to improve the way veterans and military families are perceived by the public in the United States—to be seen more as community assets and leaders.
The list, of course, goes on, and on, and on. He covers the whole gamut of global and social issues: everything from women’s empowerment, including women’s education, to AIDS research, including AIDS in children, to protecting the world’s oceans and the rights of indigenous rainforest inhabitants, to developing new technologies for clean energy and the overall good of humankind.