The Rising of the Knight in Everyone

I really wanted to find an image of Batman being the living crap out of someone. I really wanted to give my rage and heartache a representative graphic illustrating the 12 people killed and over 50 people hurt by a gunman at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado last night.

But I couldn't find something that captured my "imagination."

Instead, I found what you see posted at the top of this blog post. Maybe it's more fitting. Yeah, in "real life," Batman (if he existed in real life), would pound the bastard that shot up the movie audience into something that looks like chunky salsa, but afterward, rage would turn to grief. After all, it was the death of two innocent people, his parents, who were shot by a criminal, that created the Dark Knight in the first place. Every time some hood or madman guns down people just because they're there, it diminishes all of us. It creates, temporarily for most people, a collective drive toward justice, the need to protect the victims, the desire to punish the guilty.

But, news items being what they are and people being who we are, most of us tend to forget. We remember for weeks, months, years, what our favorite scenes are and lines of dialog from films such as TDKR, but we'll forget about the shootings in Aurora, Colorado in a few days. Something else will come along and drive it out of our memories and fractured attention spans.

For most of us, that is.

Bruce Wayne didn't forget. He never forgot. Of course, he was a kid and the people murdered right before his eyes were his parents, so you'd figure he'd never forget. But he did something more than remember. He took his anger, his guilt, and his fear, and turned it into a weapon; and incredibly powerful weapon. He turned it into Batman.

That doesn't do the rest of us much good. Batman is a fictional character. He only exists in the world of imagination. He is a symbol of our desire for dark justice and the need to not only punish the predators, but to brutalize them. He is the shadow to our light, the power to our powerlessness, the avenger to our victimhood.

He is the Dark Knight to our oppression.

We can't put on a costume and roam the night. We can't summon the heroes of fantasy into the real world of blood, and tear gas, and torn flesh, and dead bodies. But we can do something; we should do something.

All I can do is write, so that's what I'm doing. Probably a lot of people will have something to say about all this in the hours and days to come. This is me saying what I need to say right now.

As much as I'd like to take a baseball bat and beat the shooter's head like an overripe melon, that's not what needs to be done the most (I still think I'd like to do it, though, because I'm really angry right now).

No, what needs to be done more than pulling revenge and this guy's bloody colon out of his ass, is to remember the victims, to have compassion. To not give in to anger and rage, but to instead, nurture kindness and if you believe in that sort of thing, to pray for the wounded and the dying.

Anger, violence, and revenge may make us feel better in the short run, but it's justice, mercy, and compassion that heals the world in the long run. Don your metaphorical "Dark Knight" armor if you must and scream how much you'd like to hurt the guy that did all the hurting, but remember. Remember that afterward, you have to take the mask off and be who you are, to help, to rebuild broken lives.

That's the part about being a hero you don't see at the end of the movie. That's the hero in real life and I hope...I hope it's the hero you can find in yourself. I hope I can find him in me, too.

We Are the Heroes!

All of the news and social networking outlets are flooded with information about the magnitude 8.9 earthquake in Japan. A significant part of my twitter community is involved in comic book, TV, and movie superheroes. It's almost too easy to imagine Superman, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman racing to Japan to put out oil refinery fires, stabilize "at risk" nuclear reactors, and evacuate the thousands of injured victims.

Would the Martian Manhunter and the Flash show up and help cities like San Francisco prepare for the arrival of the quake-created tsunami (and thankfully, Hawaii survived its passing)? Which heroes would be patroling the Pacific, keeping ships and the populations of the many islands in harms way safe?

But we live in the real world. There are no superheroes...

...except us.

I'm not suggesting that we can put on a costume, exercise heretofore unknown super abilities, and "save the day", but we can do something more than sit around and watch it all happen on CNN.

For instance, New York City will help direct local donations to quake and tsunami victims and there is very likely a local or national group you can donate to, as well. Google has already pitched in by launching a person finder for Japanese quake victims, so if you work in technology, you may be able to leverage your skills and your business to assist.

Text "Red Cross" to 90999. $10 will be automatically charged to your phone bill as a donation to the disaster relief. Please Text "Red Cross" to 90999.

This is a link to a Reuters.com page containing links to a number of ways you can help the Japan quake victims.

And, if you are a religious or a spiritual person, you can pray.

Whoever you are, where ever you live, you don't have to turn into someone else and use fantastic, metahuman powers to make a difference. You can help by being just who you are. The only power you need to have is the power of compassion and the will to act on your humanity.

Be a hero. Help.

The Japan Earthquake Seen by Millions of Digital Cameras (Updating Live)

Save Me!

Where Have All the Heroes Gone?

This isn't a review of The Expendables. Frankly, I haven't even seen it yet. I did hear that it has completely blown away the Julia Roberts film Eat Pray Love. It's not that I don't love Julia Roberts and it's not like I don't like a good "self-discovery" film, but my heart will always belong to the action, explosion-packed, car chase, gun shooting film genre. Heck, I watched Live Free or Die Hard (2007) and Blue Thunder (1983) over the weekend just to get my fix.

But let's face it, Bruce Willis is 57 and Roy Scheider died in 2002 at the age of 75. Our classic film heroes from the 1970s and 80s aren't getting any younger. For that matter, Sly Stallone is 64 (and up until the Expendables, his more recent films haven't been doing so well) and Arnold Schwarzennegger, who along with Bruce Willis, had a cameo in The Expendables, just turned 63 a few weeks ago. Why are old guys still making action films. Is it because there are no young guys to step up to the plate?

The younger action heroes that immediately come to mind are Christian Bale from the Batman films and Terminator Salvation (2009), Johnny Depp from the various Pirates of the Caribbean films (On Stranger Tides comes out next year), and Leonardo DiCaprio from the recent hit film Inception. Also, with the power surge of super hero films that have been recently released and those coming at us in the next few years, we can hardly say that we have no young, kick ass actors out there to play these parts, so why haven't people like Stallone and Willis either retired or gone on to play older guys in character roles (imagine Stallone as Don Vito Corleone in a remake of The Godfather (1972))?

We have young guys playing action roles but frankly, they're not legends. Maybe the concept of the legendary action hero has disappeared. We used to consider action heroes with a sense of awe. Not in the way that people might drool over Johnny Depp or Leonardo DiCaprio, but these heroes were "men". I know that sounds sexist, but they were a sort of role model for the inner hero in the average, ordinary guy. Sure, we weren't about to grab a gun and go blow away an army single handedly, but these were the "ideal" men. Men of courage against overwhelming odds and often, saving the world, even while half bleeding to death, with a sense of humor and some "killer" one-liners. These guys used to be everywhere. Who didn't admire John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas (yes, Michael's Dad), Michael Douglas, Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, and on and on and... Where did they go?

The actors are there but perhaps the allure has disappeared. Today's action hero is less a hero and more a guy in a suit doing heroic stuff. We are entertained but we're not awed.

However, we're still awed by our aging classic heroes.

Today is the 33rd anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll and even people who weren't even born 33 years ago are commemorating his death and celebrating his life. Did we run out of musicians in the 21st century? No, but we may have run out of legends.

I don't think you have to die to be a legend and I don't think you have to get old before you become a legend, but you have to possess something that younger actors and other celebrities just don't seem to have today. Yet, is it a lack in them or in us? Maybe as a society, we've lost the ability to generate those feelings any more and we only feel them for older stars by way of nostalgia (and a weird sort of nostalgia if you are in awe of someone you never experienced while they were alive). I can't really decide which way it runs, but there must be a reason that a film like The Expendables not only gets made in the first place (and studios don't make films unless they expect to make a lot of money on them) but does amazingly well at the box office.

Has Elvis left the building?

Super Cowards

This isn't to put superheroes down, but don't you find it interesting that everyone who just happens to get superpowers turns out to be a hero or a villain? Good guys and bad guys...or gals. What if the person who got powers wasn't particularly courageous. Does getting powers automatically mean you have to do something either good or bad with them? What if you got superpowers?

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "If I got superpowers, I'd become a great superhero." Sure you would. I suppose if you became Superman or Superwoman or something, and your powers meant that nothing could hurt you short of kryptonite (and assuming you were the only superpowered being in the world, which means no serious challengers), it would be easy to have "courage".

You could dive into a burning building, rescue a bunch of people, and not risk getting burned or choking on the smoke. You could stop a bank robbery cold and if someone shot at you, the bullets would just bounce off your chest (sorry about the innocent bystanders who got hit by the ricochets). But what about other, less "perfect" powers?

Say, if you were bitten by a radioactive spider. Sure, Peter (in the origin story) went into entertainment and didn't think a thing about helping other people, until a bad guy he could have stopped but didn't ended up killing his Uncle Ben. If you suddenly had the proportional strength, speed, and climbing ability of a spider, what would you do with it? No, seriously. Not what would you fantasize doing with such powers, but what would you really do?

Would you make a costume and patrol the city by night? Chances are, you don't have the science and engineering skill to make web shooters, so unless you came by web spinning "naturally", as part of the process (like the Spider-Man films), you'd be out of luck there. Would you really dive into a burning building to save some kid, risking burns, smoke inhalation, and even death? Maybe you would. Most people wouldn't.

What if you were hiking alone on some nature trail and you happened to see an alien spaceship crash nearby. If you found a dying alien inside the ship and he gave you a green ring and a lantern to charge it with, then explained what they were and how to use them, would you really become Green Lantern and fight evil and injustice and dance on the ends of the Guardians' strings? Maybe so, maybe not. After all, you didn't ask for the responsibility. You didn't want the job. Why should you risk your neck?

Let's take a look at power rings for a second. You can't just activate one with a casual thought. It takes will power and lots of it. The original Hal Jordan GL had loads of will power but not a lot of imagination. He'd hit bad guys with giant boxing glove, made of green energy. He could fly. He could do anything...as long as he focused all of his will and told the ring what to do. It must have taken a lot of practice.

When Kyle Rayner took up the ring, the rules were different. No more 24 hour time limit on a charge. No more vulnerability to yellow. No requirement to be really honest or brave, which is why Kyle was chosen in the first place, but he grew into being a hero (and good thing he had a lot of imagination). Would that always happen with everyone, or would you toss the ring and the battery in the back of your closet the first time you got your butt kicked? Would you even try to go up against a bad guy or rescue people from a burning building in the first place?

Most people are OK to fly in an airplane, but if you really had the power to fly all by your little lonesome, would it freak you out? If you had spider powers, would jumping off a 50 story high building be even a little scary (this isn't the Matrix jump program...if you splat on the street, you really splat)?

Comic books are unrealistic because people can do impossible things in the comics. We overlook that because it's fun and it's entertaining. However, another piece of the unrealistic we never even think about is that, whenever anyone gets superpowers, no matter who they are or where they're from, they always make the decision, at least eventually, to become a hero or a villain. There's no in between. There's no one who decides it would be too dangerous. There's no one who even considers not making a costume, which always looks OK in comic books but almost always looks ridiculous in real life (put one on, go out in public, and see how people react, if you don't believe me).

One of the reasons superheroes don't exist in the real world is that various natural laws prevent people from getting a spider's natural abilities by being bitten by a radioactive arachnid. As far as we know, no aliens have visited our planet, especially ones with magic green rings to give away to the casual passerby. As far as we know, no alien from another planet has grown up on Earth and gets incredible superpowers just by working on his tan.

Another reason why there are no superheroes is, even if we severely bend the laws of physical reality, no one, or almost no one, who got superpowers would really do what we see people in comic books do...decide they have a moral responsibility to the rest of humanity to use those powers to help. I guess we'll never know if I'm right or not but consider one more point.

We do have heroes. A hero is someone without special powers who dives into a freezing river to help a Dad pull a kid out of a car that drove off the side of the road a minute ago. A hero is a firefighter who runs into a burning building, risking getting burned, choking on smoke, and even killed, to pull out someone who would otherwise die. A hero is someone who joins a group of passengers on a hijacked aircraft to stop the hijackers from crashing the plane into a populated area, dying in the attempt. These heroes are ordinary people. These heroes are your neighbors, co-workers, family, and friends. One of these heroes could even be you. What made them heroes wasn't any special power. What made them heroes was that, when the circumstances called for it, they put whatever fears they may have had aside and made a decision to make a difference.

I could be wrong. Maybe getting superpowers would be like one of those circumstances, but the situation wouldn't be comic book nice and neat. Your life and the people whose lives are in danger aren't just two-dimensional characters on the printed page. They're real. You're real. Powers or not, you may face a situation where you have to decide if you can make a difference. Your name won't be Clark Kent or Diana Prince. They're just examples of what the best of us could be. We're the real life expressions of who we are and the hero we could possibly become.

What if you got superpowers? You probably never will. But that doesn't mean you won't ever have a chance to be a hero. When your chance comes, what will you do?