Okay. It's time for me to say this, and then you can all gasp in astonished horror, loudly enough to suck in a housefly or a stray child, and stalk off in outrage to some other blog; some nice, civilized blog written by a blood-drinking, Bush-voting, baby-slapping stinkbug who was raised by wolves and blogs without using vowels, punctuation, or the word "the".
I.....
(covering my head)
neverlikedchristopherreeve.
There. It's out. I've said it, and I meant it, and I'll say it again if I have to.
I agree--it was tragic, what happened to him. And yes, he devoted the rest of his life to helping others after his tragedy and yada yada yada wocka wocka wocka.
But.
If he was Joseph P. "I-Never-Starred-In-Superman" Blow, and he had fallen off a horse and ended up paralyzed, and spent ten years in a wheelchair, nearly....would we have known anything about him? Even if he'd spent the intervening ten years agitating for the rights of the disabled and for research for funding? Would we have ever seen him on TV, or known of his death?
(Hint: no.)
So basically, we're mourning him not because of the work he did for stem-cell research, or for his activism for the disabled: we're mourning him because he could fly, twenty-five years ago.
Somehow I have a hard time with that.
You may now all pummel me with Wiffle-ball bats, table legs, and sockfuls of pennies. I will accept my penance stoically.
I think I liked him because, after the initial phase of depression and apathy, he found the strength to get back on his proverbial feet in the hope of someday getting back onto his literal ones. I drown in my angsty despair over comparatively trivial things, and here this fellow is beaming away on television at the news that he wiggled his toes for the first time in a decade. Made me rethink my mewling.
ReplyDeleteAnd he was desperately hot back in his walking days. Blimey.
See, I guess this dovetails a little bit with what I always tell Firefly, when she calls me and then apologizes a hundred times for being "depressing":
ReplyDeleteEverybody gauges their misery differently. What's catastrophic to one person may be trivial to another, and everybody has their threshold of "catastrophic". We can only really judge our misery by the worst we've ever personally felt. And honestly, I don't think we're ever really equipped to judge how bad it is for someone else--not to downgrade it, at least. To upgrade it, maybe--to assume that what they're feeling about something that happened might be WORSE than how we would feel in the same situation--but never that they "shouldn't feel so bad" or that what's hurting them "isn't important". I think everyone can remember at least one time in their younger years when a parent or some other authority figure mocked them: "What are you crying about? That's nothing. You think THAT's worth crying over?" Everytime I hear someone say that, I think well OBVIOUSLY they think it's worth crying over, or they wouldn't be crying!So as far as your "mewling", be kind to yourself. It's obviously not "trivial" to you.
Now, back to Mr. Reeve...
The notion of lionizing someone for "getting back on their feet"--speaking metaphorically--is a strange one to me, for a couple of reasons. One, because it assumes that there's some pool of personal strength from which they're drawing in order to do this. Which is fine, except for what it implies about those who DON'T manage to "get over it"--that they're somehow NOT drawing on this strength, whether because they don't WANT to be strong, or whether they don't have the CAPABILITY of being strong. Either one, to me, is vaguely dismissive. "Christopher Reeve is a hero because he overcame these obstacles." Fine for him--but if "hero"="someone who overcomes huge obstacles", then "someone who cannot/does not overcome their obstacles"=....what???
The other reason the whole "getting back on your feet" thing is strange to me--and it seems to contradict my other reason--but here it is: Seriously, what choice do we have? Faced with some horrible tragedy, something we survive but which changes us unalterably, what are our choices? At the worst, we can choose to finish the job--take our own lives. Okay--some people do that. It goes back to my original statement: everyone has their threshhold of "this is too much to bear". And who would know better than they would, what sort of existence they can or cannot accept for themselves?
Then there are a few, I'm sure, who just turn bitter and horrible and say nothing positive, ever, for the rest of their lives--unless it's "I'm positive the rest of my life is going to suck." Fair enough. But the majority of people, faced with a tragedy, adjust to some degree. And that's where the slope gets slippery. How much adjustment, how much acceptance, how much optimism and hopefulness, is "enough"? At what point does someone become a "hero" who is only playing the cards they were dealt? What divides "hero" from "not-hero"?
I'm getting needlessly philosophical here, I'm sure--but you see what I'm getting at? If it happened to you, would you do any different? If you did, would that make you less courageous, less amazing, less heroic? And if so...why?
PS to Ka: I'm going to your blog now, Ka. And when I get there, there had BETTER be more info about that hot date you were going on! :)
ReplyDeleteI admire your honesty & have to say i totally see where you're coming from. For me his accident, etc has made no diffrence to me. Simply when i was a young lad that guy was Superman, so it kinda gets me in the same way it would, say Mark Hamill.
ReplyDelete