In my world, the biggest villain I knew about as a kid was the Devil. The bible told me so:

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:

How terrifying! An enemy of God himself but he was very willing to pick on us regular people since he lost heaven to God.

Satan was the original super villain. God, however, was not such a good superhero. God is a little bigger than the hero role.

To get a really good story of a hero, the Greeks have the gold. Homer wrote the story of the hero’s battle of Troy.

Yes, there was a beatuiful woman involved. But it was really all about the fighting.

A hero isn’t a superhero has a supervillain to fight.

Homer gave us the story. Achilles was so strong, and all his friends were almost as strong. They were the children of imoortal god, more than just men. Perhaps because of their half-divine status they were a little lazy.

Hector, the Trojan hero, was the opponent who put them to shame. He was strong. He was disciplined.

He beat them. More than once.

The villain has to be a real threat or it’s not good story.

Superman has that problem. Now he is mocked for his impossible strength. He was too close to perfect. He was so strong they had to invent an external weakness: krypronite. But it felt like a cheat.

The tension in life is in the struggle. The story has to fill us with the tension so that we cannot turn away.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN?

The hero is always me. Or I want it to be. I want to believe my struggles matter in the larger picture. It’s great if my problems can be seen as an epic intergalactic struggle between right (of course ME!) and wrong (anything that bugs me).

I need the bad guy, I need to struggle against the bad guy so I can get better. I need the struggle to mean something.

Thank you, Darth Vader. Thank you Joker and Dr. Octopus. And thanks Hector and Satan. I wouldn’t be who I am today without you.

“I’m glad you sat where you did. I thought all the seat faced backwards.”

It was the end of my glorious trip to Denver and I had just boarded the train to get to the airport. The friend who had dropped me off told me the line ended at the airport so I could right it to the end and not have to transfer.

When I stepped up into train I saw all the seats facing me. Would I have to ride the whole way backwards?

Then I saw a guy towards the front of the car sit down facing forward. Ah ha! The seats on that end of the car faced forward. I made my way up there and sat in the row in front of that guy.

“I’m so glad you sat down! I wouldn’t have noticed the seat faced forward,”

It took him a moment to understand what I meant. “I’ve never ridden this train before.”

That’s when I filled him in with the knowledge my friend had given me. One straight shot all the way to the end.

But when we compared tickets, we saw a problem.

He had a ticket that was only good for local routes. I had a ticket that went all the way to the airport. His was 6 dollars and mine was 10.

Hm. He had acted in good faith. But the ticket wasn’t right.

I had just met him, but I could see the situation and the ramifications clearly.

He could step off and get the right ticket. Or he could stay put.

What were the consequences?

This is exactly the sort of conundrum life presents us so often.

You gotta ask yourself:

Do you feel lucky?

What was at risk? What did he stand to gain or lose?

There are a few things that are certain. There are a lot more that aren’t. And even the things that are certain might not be. Almost every choice is a risk.

So much is life is doing your best, taking your chances and seeing how it works out.

I knew that the train came every 15 minutes, so his risk in this case if he got caught was small. He had enough time to get off, and fix it.

It’s great if life leaves you a margin. But even without a margin, the risks still have to be taken.

I know I’ll be lucky some of the time. And when I’m not, I’ll just have to try again.

That’s the way I want to live. I guess I do feel lucky. Or at least I want to be lucky.

I took aa trip. It had been such a long time since I flew away to see a friend. This pandemic shut the world down and took away my choices.

It was a wall of everyone has to do what everyone else is doing. In fact, it was the law. Or very close to the law. And it was considered the moral thing to do. Behind a mask is someone who cares, so if you don’t have a mask you don’t care.

Maybe it is, maybe it was the right thing to do.

But discussion about whether it was or not was—is—silenced. Repressed, censored, shut down, deplatformed and shamed.

I took a flight and followed the federal law to wear a mask on the plan in in the airport. I wore it the whole way.

And when I landed, I was so happy to see the friends and family that I had come to see.

We walked around this new-to-me town.

It was beautiful. I enjoyed the shops and bought some things. We found a used bookstore that looked more like a headshop.

And in the back, I met a lovely gray-haired woman whose last name was Cassady.

Famous beat author Neal Cassady’s daughter was selling books and showing memorabilia. She was delighted that I knew who her father was.

Oh yes. The beats are very important to me. These people who took the road less traveled. Who went against the conformity that engulfed the nation in the 1950’s and sucked the marrow from the bones of life.

They got together and had conversations about forbidden subjects and tried unthinkable things.

And they wrote. They wrote and found ways for others to read their words

They opened up the minds of America and the world.

What would they have thought of my trip? How is my current situation similar to theirs?

There was a whole world war that America had just come through when these guys were making the scene.

The man in the gray flannel suit was the ideal for them.

Except it wasn’t.  In a 1958 Esquire article Kerouac writes

“a sinister new kind of efficiency appeared in America; maybe it was the result of the universalization of television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet’s “peace” officers), but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity”

What options did them have? What options do we have now? I know there are a set of people with extended unemployment checks and their loved ones—or not—sitting at home thinking of what to do next.

The beats would be looking for life and a new style of American culture.

How would they tweak this? I’d like to think of what Neal, Jack, Allen and Lawrence would look at what possibilities are here.

And of course I found what I’d forgotten I knew while on the road.

I think I want to get on the road more often. And I want to read all the beat books again.

Juneteenth is now a federal holiday. I learned about Juneteenth maybe ten years ago. The basic story is that President Abraham Lincoln had freed all slaves in the Emancipation proclamation. But that proclamation was not applicable until the North won the civil war.

The former slave owners did not tell all the slaves they were free when the war was conceded. It took Union soldiers to come tell these people their new freedom.

Jefferson said the beautiful phrase in the declaration of independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”

Liberty is an unalienable right. And yet, we can be alienated from our liberty.

There is a story that circus elephants are trained while they are little, with a strong leg band chained to a stake. They fight and pull to get away and have their freedom. They gall their leg, tearing their skin bloody. Thus, they learn not to fight the restraint. This lasts past their growth into adulthood.

It doesn’t even take the actual wound anymore. Just the memory or the threat of that pain is enough.

I have framed my understanding of the world and placed things into categories. There are forbidden things, things that cause pain.

But I am not the same as I was yesterday. And I’m not in the same place. What might be possible now that wasn’t possible before?

I am glad this story of Juneteenth is a yearly holiday now. The declaration of Independence wasn’t enough. Our understanding of liberty needs to be revisited.

What freedoms have I surrendered and forgotten? I can test some limits.

It’s always and every day a choice. The calvary can come in and let me know that I’m free. I’m grateful to the people in my life who do just that.

And also, I want to be my own calvary. That takes revisiting my assumptions and testing limits regularly.

I value my freedom. Liberty is worth fighting for and protecting.