It is Sunday night and I am at my computer reading about the day and the crazy world around me when I hear Heath Ledger’s Joker refer to himself as an Agent of Chaos.
Doesn’t take but a moment for the soundtrack to start playing in my head an for a variety of clips to flow through the melon on top of my neck.
If you want to know more about how I think and what I visualize you are welcome to watch the clips below or to reach out and ask.
Ledger was great as the Joker and there was a time when my son was little in which we agreed that it was good that he was a movie character and not real.
At the time I knew one day we would have a conversation about how characters can be developed from real people or that we would speak about someone or some people in particular but he was young enough I saw no reason to burst that bubble.
At a hair short of 20 he is old enough to know better and we watched this clip and talked a bit about the reality of life.
We Have No Batman
There are heroes in our world but none that are superheroes of the comic book world so we have more limitations that need to be addressed and worked with.
Since we have no Batman we need to leverage our resources and use the tools we have as best as possible.
I started following Heather Cox Richardson a while back. She is a historian and professor whose insights and commentary I have come to really appreciate.
Let’s take a section of her most recent as an example.
An A.P. story then offered a doozy of a paragraph: “As cities burned night after night and images of violence dominated television coverage, Trump’s advisers discussed the prospect of an Oval Office address in an attempt to ease tensions. The notion was quickly scrapped for lack of policy proposals and the president’s own seeming disinterest in delivering a message of unity.”
That Trump hid in the White House while he was urging others to violence captures his personality, but it undercuts his carefully crafted image as a man of courage. The leak of this story is itself astonishing: we should not know how a president is being protected, and that Trump is bullying to project an image of being a tough guy while he is actually hiding is a big story, especially since presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was out in the streets talking to protesters today. And to admit that Trump has no policy proposals and has no interest in delivering a messag. e of unity…. Wow.
That section follows commentary about the president’s fanning flames of hate via Twitter and questions about who the players are in the field now.
Which people/groups are actively working on turning peaceful protests into riots and what else is going on around us.
We’re going to have to link arms and find ways to hold the lines of decency, civility and order.
There are no Dark Knights or Avengers waiting in the wings to take out the bad guys so we are going to have to do it ourselves.
This is going to be our time to demonstrate our finest hour and show our kids, each other and the world that we aren’t a dying state whose best days are something talked about in books, documentaries and tales told by older folks.
Can we get there? Can we get beyond the mess we are in now and find a way to do more than remember who we were?
Time will tell, now won’t it.
