This isn’t really a post about Superhero shows. It’s about our country, ourselves, accountability, responsibility, and autonomy, including the right to protect such.
See, my issue with superhero shows, even though I LOVE them, is this whole good guys don’t kill spiel.
It keeps showing up. I recently rewatched Buffy on Netflix and something I didn’t notice when I was younger was this ridiculous need for the characters to say how bad killing a human was. Killing a demon who never did anything to anybody besides be a demon was perfectly fine, but killing a human, even in self defense, nope… that’s wrong.
Huh?
Now take some more recent superhero shows. Stuff like The Flash and Arrow, both of which I love and watch religiously. There’s this notion that the good guys don’t kill, not even bad guys. Which has, obviously, led to the bad guys getting out and killing more people. It’s stupid, but it’s such an ingrained trope that people are used to it and just shrug, saying, that’s what happens in superhero shows.
So what does this have to do with all that political stuff I mentioned?
Everything!
This idea that you don’t kill, to make sure the bad guy doesn’t get out and kill more people yet again, or even in self defense is a very… I don’t know how to say this nicely so I’ll just say it. It’s fucking socialist!
Wait, just hang on and follow me for a second.
In some countries, they have a very different idea of the right to individual autonomy than we do. They don’t allow for self defense. If you kill someone defending your life in America, depending on how the facts shake out and what state you’re in (because some have gun laws so fucked up they should move to Europe) you may be charged if the police don’t believe you, but as long as you can show self defense, you don’t get put in jail, because you have a right to self defense (again, sometimes you have to prove that it was defense, but that is a perfectly acceptable reason for killing in the US.)
In many other countries (I’m not saying all of them because I don’t know all their laws, but in the bulk of the “civilized world”) you don’t have that right. You kill someone in self defense, you’re going to jail if they can prove you did it.
Yeah, let that sink in a second. You kill someone trying to kill, assault, rape, ect… you, and you’re the one behind bars.
Now I’ve had to edit this post because the very obvious (to me at least, but hey, I wrote the original in my 15 minute break) point I was making is these countries don’t allow this right because they don’t allow weapons.
Saying you have the right to self defense as long as you beat the guy to death instead of shooting him, is like saying you have that right as long as you are a big, strong, healthy man. Because duh, women are smaller on average and us beating some big guy attacking us to death, not very likely.
So yeah, you don’t get to shoot your rapist in many countries in the supposedly civilized world. Just lay back and think of England, honey, because she sure wasn’t thinking of you when she made her gun laws.
Now, why is this? It’s because in socialist countries, people aren’t owned by themselves, they are owned by the state. The state considers you its property, and you aren’t allowed to kill another of its property.
The term usually thrown around is widgets. To a country like that, you are a widget. And all widgets are worth the same (except the higher ups who run it because they get to be actual people) and no matter what widget is damaged, it’s still property lost, and therefore the taker must be punished.
This is where people are trying to take us in America.
Yeahhhhhhhhh. This is where people like me say, “Over my dead body and my smoking guns.”
But the people who hold these beliefs have this ingrained into our culture through education and yes, the media. This idea that you can’t kill, even if it’s to keep that horrible person from killing more people or in self defense, is pounded into the scripts. Now, sometimes they deviate, but then the person has to feel bad. The characters are allowed to make “mistakes” by killing someone, but they have to feel horrible about it. They have to be haunted, otherwise it’s like saying it’s okay to kill under some circumstances.
And we can’t have that. We might have our widgets getting out of control.
In America, or at least, how it used to be before the socialists took over one network and school at a time, and how we still hope it is, what you do matters. You work hard, you can pull yourself up from humble roots. You attack people, expect to be shot. There’s accountability for your actions (again, this is becoming less and less true because now people can live off the government forever or argue they couldn’t help but become a criminal because they were born poor).
There should be accountability. There should be consequences. Because that’s how an individual keeps themselves from being generally bad, lazy, a rapist or a murderer. And no, I don’t see killing in self defense as murder. It’s killing, sure, but murder is a legal term and self defense is outside of that (at least in America… at least for now.)
Anyway, there’s the rant for the day. Take it or leave it, but at least think about it, and the consequences to the country when there are not consequences to the individual.
Happy Friday!
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