ramblings, random musings, fascinations, rants, raves and revelations

Yesterday, I was reintroduced to my first love. Yes, back in kindergarten and first grade, the love of my life was Superman, the hero in the movie played by the late Christopher Reeves. [Imagine my distress, when he died]

I just watched Smallville 7… we had a somehow sunny, windy, Manila's Christmas Season weather where the only viable option was to curl up on the couch at home and watch movies and TV. And this one really struck me. There’s something to the innate goodness of Clark that I’ve missed seeing in movies and books. As of late, we like heroes who are hardboiled, cynical, damaged and “dark”. While I know as well as anyone the draw of a good antihero [all the book characters that I’ve been in love with are dark, damaged, cynical and good despite their preferences], I’m wondering if this isn’t a bad thing for us as people, that we don’t believe in good and heroic heroes anymore.

This really stood out to me in light of watching, for much of the rest of the day, the show Big Brother–more specifically, the UBER live feed that they’re playing nightly this time. Don’t get me wrong– I still like the reality show, but it strikes me that this is a microcosm of life as most of us in “the new age” [for lack of a better term] live our lives. We shut off all contact with the outside world, become intimately involved in the [ultimately meaningless] maneuvering for power within our self-limited circles, and insist on living life as though we’re playing a zero-sum game.

In some ways it’s probably more comfortable to live like this. After all, when your world has prescribed boundaries, you don’t have to worry about anything outside those boundaries, and you have a lot more control over what happens in a little goldfish bowl than you do over the whole ocean. But at the same time, when you deny the existence of life outside of the fishbowl, you render essentially meaningless ideas like “the greater good” or even alleviating suffering among people who don’t live in your bowl. Because admitting the existence of the downtrodden in the world outside would shatter the confines of a tidy game and its self-imposed rules, we often choose to disregard things we honestly shouldn’t. Thus arguing about the war becomes the matter of how much attrition of those who staged another hotel mutiny is acceptable– and really more about which political movements in the country you agree with– instead of a matter of thinking about the best interests of the people in that part of the world that, for better or worse, we have assumed some responsibility for.

Besides, when we limit ourselves to only a self-referential idea of values, all based off the “game” of life that we invented for ourselves, it becomes increasingly easy over time to talk ourselves into, at times, a complete reversal of the values that we purportedly live by. The “right to choose” becomes the “right to die” becomes “the duty to die” once one becomes a burden on the younger, prettier and stronger…

Superman, as he was originally conceived, stood for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” [which I think meant the idealistic American way that may or may not have ever really existed, where we championed good over evil and attempted to ensure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–in that order–to all people in the world]. How many people do you know who believe in Truth, Justice, and living life according to a broader set of values like that? Not many, I’m guessing. I think if more of us opened our lives and understanding to the greater world, and to the need for greater values, we’d find many more people who were willing to act on those values. In that sense, we’d have a nation full of Supermen…