I do a lot of writing to clarify my own thinking; sometimes something doesn't become real to me until I've written it out in my own words.
And sometimes it takes someone else's words to crystallise what I've been hunting around; often, the closer something is to me, the more important something is to me, the more I need someone else's words to tell me what I'm thinking.
Or, to be fair, not thinking. Enemies are as good as friends, in this regard. Sometimes enemies are better than friends: see here:
So here's one that's been knocking about in my head for a while now, ever since I watched the two rebooted Spiderman movies and (surprisingly to me) The Winter Soldier, in someone else's words:
Captain America’s stories rest on a seemingly simple idea: that you don’t become a hero when you gain super strength, or when you put on Spandex, or when you decide to beat up criminals in the middle of the night. You become a hero when you decide to do the right thing. You become a hero when you do good things not because you want praise, or revenge, or glory, but because they are good.
To find heroism dull is, to me, the worst kind of cynicism. It is rejecting not only the idea that goodness for goodness’s sake can exist, but that goodness for goodness’s sake should exist. When you reject Cap’s brand of heroism, you are stating plainly that you would rather see selfishness than selflessness—that you would rather see bigotry than tolerance—that you would rather see pettiness than nobility. You are saying you would rather see the small ways in which humanity can fail than the enormous ways in which we are capable of being extraordinary.
. It is only Steve who can see beyond gadgets and glory to see the heart of the superhero genre itself: not some adolescent power fantasy of being big and strong, but the much more human fantasy of being the best that we are capable of being.
That, I think, is what I see in the three movies I mentioned. And that is what I see when Tony Stark flies out to Gulmira, and when Peter Parker-- not yet Spiderman-- rushes out to the bridge and climbs down to save a child and doesn't just snatch him and run, but comforts him and teaches him how to be strong.
Heroism isn't about power.
Heroism is about making yourself the best person you can be, in every area that you can be-- and helping everyone you can do the same.
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