Everyday, I venture out into my day with a healthy dose of idealism. I like to believe that people are good, and I work to see the good in people, even when most difficult.
This is why I struggled with the Batman movie: The Dark Knight. I love Batman. I grew up watching the tv series with jumping bananas Batman and Robin.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3JtIkTktz0
Batman/Bruce Wayne is an ordinary man. The joker is an ordinary man. Two face is an ordinary man. Gordon is an ordinary man. Yet, Gotham is havocked by crime and despair. The movie paints Gotham (as it should according to plot) as a very bleak and dismal city.
I walked away from the movie with a heavy heart, searching for optimism. These weren’t superheroes who ravaged a city and killed for pleasure. Just men. These weren’t superheroes whose hearts were hardened by bitterness, anger and unfair circumstances, but fellow, ordinary, human beings.
Indeed, the Joker, as Batman and Gordon state, got the best of them by showing that even a great man, Gotham’s White Knight, Harvey Dent, can be hardened.
I walked out of the theater finding it hard not to be hardened as well. All the work we do in social marketing, nonprofits, social change…where’s it all going and what’s it doing? What’s the solution? How do we inspire others not to let their hearts become hardened?
Though I left the movie more torn about life’s deeper issues than I have in a long time, I refused to be give in. Instead, I see it as a new challenge to rise above and as a community, address and solve. For Batman was an ordinary man. So was Gordon. and Alfred. and Mother Teresa. Ghandi. Martin Lurther King, Jr.
Perhaps the reality is, is that we ALL have a little Batman inside of us, just waiting to melt the world.
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You know what, a week after watching the movie I still feel the same way. I am a huge Batman fan – one man, who struggles with his own anguish over losing his parents to crime and just realizing that the city needed SOMEONE to stand up to the downward spiral.
He may not be glamorous and liked by all, but he gets the job done. And I wholeheartedly agree with you about the “how much do we actually get accomplished?” thoughts – but you know what? I bring to mind the people who have had their lives changed because of a simple ad, a campaign watched on TV or a piece of information that I have passed on which has touched somebody’s life. It may sound cheesy but the “if at least one life gets changed” motto rings true everyday for me.
The forces to minimize idealism and “good” in the world are always going to be there, we just have to be prepared and willing to suit up and use the great tools we have now, just like Batman does 🙂
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Idealism? For me, it died when my parents were interned and stripped of their citizenship for the crime of looking like the enemy. Mom’s service as a nurse, and Dad’s heroism on the battlefields of Italy and France, along with all his brothers throughout America’s ‘Good War’, counted for nothing.
To quote Dad, “Idealism is for those who have never faced the true ugliness of mankind.”