I'm a little disillusioned lately. We've got the oil spill in the Gulf, random people blowing themselves and others up, economic crises, climate crises and natural disasters galore. But it's not the headlines alone that depress me. I know we humans require some drama or we get bored and start building doomsday machines and getting into mischief. What bothers me is James Cameron and his ilk making us believe that we have heroes in our midst who are capable of mitigating disaster.As a child of celluloid, I was taught early on that should the Earth's core stop spinning and generating the electromagnetic field, really really smart people would immediately be called upon to set it right. If a colony of sea-faring aliens began to wonder if they should send tidal waves and other aquatic phenomena over to the greedy human land-dwellers to teach them a lesson, individuals with deep-sea technology and moral fortitude would show the interlopers that we're not so bad after all. And of course, if our little blue planet were on a collision course with an asteroid, we could rest assured Billy Bob Thornton would be able to organize a way to thwart global destruction.
Don't think for a second that I've forgotten about Superman and his spandex sporting super-colleagues either.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but I do think this is all somehow related to a kind of faith-based fatalism. A deus-ex-machina mentality that we've settled into. After all, we've already invented the cotton gin and the automobile. We've put a man on the moon. And we have the internet now, so we can Wikipedia any number of topics without learning about them in-depth, yet hold our own when it comes to pithy, random quips online. I just hope we won't evolve into a race of fat-bottomed, internet-savvy backseat drivers who have lost the ability to roll our sleeves up, get dirty, and embrace danger and adversity with the savoir faire of our Hollywood superheroes.
