Blue and Green Marble
It’s been a hard week, regardless of what news channel you watch. This weekend I stumbled upon a Superman movie on TV, one of the newer versions. At first I wasn’t sure what I was watching; I walked into the room and the movie was in full swing. So I watched for a bit and when I left the room I did so with a head full of heroes and heroic deeds.
My thoughts brought to mind a scene from Upside Down Kingdom:
The Twilight Tattoo was a good show. The Army band played while flags from every state were presented, rifles were tossed--which was Dante’s favorite part--and a drum line played impressively fast and did drumstick tricks in unison--which was my favorite part.
“Why aren’t you in uniform?” I asked Dante as we watched the show together.
“I am, technically,” he said. “See?” he showed me the earpiece he was wearing. “I’m wired to the other plainclothes officers. We’re posted two to every set of bleachers, about one to every fifty people.”
“Just to keep people in line?”
“To look for terrorists and stop them before they blow anything up,” he said soberly.
“Here?”
“Why not here? We’re in front of the White House, there are families and children present, and a chunk of the Army is busy doing a performance.”
I looked around warily, feeling shocked and a bit stupid for not realizing we could be in danger. “But…”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Relax and enjoy the show. It’s the same as anything else since September 11. Nothing happens in this town without the Army being present—even if we’re not seen. It’s been this way for almost a year now.”
“But I didn’t know about it.”
He smiled. “You’re not supposed to. We’re looking out for everyone. You see that obnoxious guy in the flowered shirt who looks like a tourist over there? The one letting his kids run all over the place?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“We’re even guarding that guy, and those bratty kids.”
Heroes don’t save just the people who agree with them or the people with the same background or upbringing or the same adversities to overcome. Heroes don’t pick and choose. They don’t weed out. When they save the planet, they save our whole blue-and-green marble complete with the clouds swirling around it. You get all of the awesome weirdos and strangers together. You get the clouds and the storms. You get the fluffy bunnies and the creepy spiders, too.
The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we’ve screwed up, or if we think we’ve fallen short, or if our kids are running amok. It doesn’t matter if we don’t have it all figured out. It doesn’t matter if we’re still tuning in to the voices around us telling us what they think we should do with our lives. When the planet gets saved, we all benefit, whether we think we deserve it or not. When the heroes show up, we all get a participation trophy.
The question is: Is that enough?
