Good luck to all of you receiving your final grades this afternoon. I hope you get what you deserve, not only in English, but in all courses.
These in-between days are weird. No snow in sight (yet), and I woke this morning to see a blast of sunshine on my bedroom wall around 6:30 a.m.. Then it disappeared and now it looks and feels very much like a gray, dull kind of day is developing.
I have a theory that these are the days when you find out what you’re made of. Anybody can leap out of bed, ready to take on the world on a spectacular, sunny day in July. But it takes true heart to slog through the gray days of April and still feel like you accomplished something worthwhile.
My wife and I watched Spiderman yesterday afternoon because, with the new movie coming out in early May, we thought it would be fun to re-visit and remember what the first instalment in the series was all about. And it was just as good as I remembered, if not better. Spiderman is one of those rare comic-book movies that gives the characters a decidedly dark edge, making the protagonist all-too-human, meaning that he is vulnerable, makes mistakes of judgement and action and even suffers the consequences for it. Spidey hurts the ones he loves even more than he hurts those loathes. Oh, and I couldn’t help but notice the dual personality of The Green Goblin a la Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—the mad scientist who creates a secondary, evil creature that he soon finds he is unable to control. Of course, isn’t that what Spiderman is all about?
Funny how all heroes need to wear masks. Most of them anyway. I mean, sure there’s Superman who takes off his glasses, shows off his blue tights, and tousles his hair in a slightly different mode (I can’t tell the difference; can you? Only his hair dresser knows for sure). The wearing of a mask would only take away from his natural good looks, and that’s partly what his character is about. There are others, I guess, who don’t wear masks, but the majority of them do. Batman is a gazillionaire by day, who couldn’t dare to let the world know that he is the caped crusader in tights, a cowl, and a codpiece. I guess I wouldn’t be too eager to share that information either.
And they all have their reasons for being secretive. Partly, it has to do with the necessity of keeping the world at bay so that the superheroes are free to save it in their own way. It would be pretty hard to save the world if the bad guys knew where you lived and all the rest of it.
But I think it also has to do with the idea of the secret lifestyle—the idea that we all have a hidden side of ourselves that’s just waiting to come to the surface. Sometimes that hidden side is better than our “real” selves (the one we present in public); but most times it’s a side that is darker than the face we present to the world. Comic book heroes struggle with such broad, seemingly disparate concepts as “good” and “evil” as if there were no shades of gray. Fair enough. It’s only entertainment, after all.
But most of us in the so-called real world don’t have that luxury of recognizing good or evil in stark, unwavering, clearly identifiable terms. Sure, we know that school shootings, rape, and genocide are acts of evil (though more and more, the g.d. media presents us with the voice and manifesto of the monster and thereby creates literal sympathy for the devil among certain people who are probably bent that way anyway). But it can all get so confusing—you might find yourself recognizing humanity (a cry for understanding, a plea that “society drove me to it”) in the monster’s voice and, even though you know he/she is still a scourge upon society, there is that twinge of doubt in your mind—that part of you that wonders: did I have any part in this? Did the things that I believe in, that society believes in, our intolerance of difference, our pursuit of personal wealth and happiness, and all the rest of it, play some role in the creation of this monster?
The questions are worthwhile, but potentially damaging. They can blind us to formerly stable concepts such as truth, justice, and (cough, cough) the American way. We’re more and more becoming a society that is incapable of meting out justice because we are handcuffed by our own moral quandaries, while the “bad guys” feel free to mete out their own justice without fear of consequence. Sometimes alienation, death, and martyrdom are exactly what they want more than anything; it is often what they are.
Spiderman has similar dilemmas. But he at least tries and is rarely handcuffed, though, like most of us, occasionally finds himself entrapped in a web of his own making.
Days like these (by which I mean every day), we each have the potential to be heroes in our own lives. (I distinguish heroes from superheroes in the same way that I distinguish models from supermodels, sizes from super-sizes, and dupers from super-dupers: the “super” version has powers that are way off the charts and immeasurable in their potential for both good and bad.) I mean, you can wake up in the morning (or whenever you wake up) and you can decide: will I take out the garbage today or let it pile up in the corner until the town officials break down my door and declare me a nuisance to society? Will I be nice to the cashier at Wal-mart who’s just having a hard day or will I be a part of the problem by being nasty right back at her/him?
There are lots of ways to be a hero. And most of us choose that route without even knowing it. I’m always impressed with people who constantly do the right thing, who make themselves get up and go to work every morning and usually manage to keep a genuine smile on their face. There’s a very ordinary kind of heroism involved there. It only takes a school shooting or a daylight robbery, or some idiot setting fire to a warehouse or scribbling grafitti on someone else’s storefront to make us realize that normal isn’t as bland as it appears to be. Normal sometimes takes a lot of courage, especially when we are constantly bombarded with examples of extraordinary evil or just evil in its many shades.
Sometimes, I believe, the most heroic thing you can do is just choosing to be a good person who does your job well and performs your function as a decent human being, friend, and family member to the best of your ability—regardless of the other, myriad possibilities for your life.
Anyway, whatever grade you get today in your various courses, I do truly hope you are able to reconcile yourself with its implications about whether or not you “showed up” and did the work. But only for yourself and not for anyone else. True heroism, I believe, is shown when you are tested and there are no real, obvious consequences for doing good or bad. When you look in the mirror, how do you grade your own performance? That’s more important than any official grade from anyone else.
Regardless, I don't believe the axiom that you're only as good as your last grade. Life carries your average forward. It's an accumulative grade, earned every minute of every day. Academia, however, is not so different. The grade is made, not just at the big, showy final exam (metaphoricaly speaking, as well) or research paper; it's also made on that snowy Friday in early February when you chose whether to show up or not, having read the book or not, with something to say or not. You decided that, and I'm not saying it's either good or bad, no matter what you chose. It's beyond good and evil. It is what it is.
Gerard
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