Adam Graham's Blog: Christians and Superheroes - Posts Tagged "poverty"

One more comment on Superman in the Forties before I return it to the library.

As I mentioned in my review, in Action Comics #1, after stopping wife-beating, preventing an unjust execution, and saving Lois, Superman set out to prevent a war. Jerry Siegel believed that war was exclusively caused by munitions dealers and by intimidating the arms dealer into enlisting, Superman prevented the war. That was in 1938.

Real war came the next year. In 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor, Siegel wrote a story for Look Magazine where Superman stopped the war in two pages.

However, when America entered the war, everyone knew Superman couldn't fight it. This was helped by Superman participating in war games and despite his efforts, his army lost because of the determination of American soldiers to prevail. Superman proclaimed his prime in America's fighting men who were America's true secret weapon.

Siegel himself served in the military and Superman was endowed with a little extra dose of humility. There were limits, there were problems so big he couldn't solve.

But this didn't make Superman impotent in the face of real suffering. It just required a different solution. This was best illustrated in the story, "Christmas Around the World." In that tale, Superman brings Christmas to towns in war torn countries and helps reunite four child war refugees with their parents.

Superman's efforts are only superhuman in the amount of time his mission took. Such relief efforts have been done since by people who have come with supplies and gifts to troubled lands. Superman had learned that he couldn't help everyone but that he could help someone.

Of course, more modern writers and producers have drawn a subtly different lesson: Superman can't help.

In the movie Superman IV, Superman undertakes to destroy all the world's nuclear weapons, but ends up realizing as a result of facing Lex Luthor's ridiculous clone of him, that humanity needs to solve the problem for themselves. Similarly in the graphic novel, Peace on Earth, Superman tries to stop world hunger but fails and instead urges people to share knowledge with needy people.

The big difference here is that rather than finding a smaller way in which he can make a difference, Superman is left to shrug his shoulders and say, "It's all up to you."

Perhaps, this in part because of the obvious parallels written into the superman mythos creating an analogy between Superman and Christ. It is as if the writers want to say that God is impotent in these matters and it's all up to us.

However, we're left with the same problem Superman faced: the problems are too big, particularly if they're too big for Superman.

Some times, the use of statistics to emphasize the scope of a problem like poverty is simply overwhelming. If you say, "X number of children in our state will go to bed hungry," I think it makes people overwhelmed. And if you start talking world hunger with hundreds of millions and billions thrown in, good night.

It's hard to see when you start talking numbers like that how a few boxes of pasta or a few dollars can make a difference, and statistically you may be right.

However, the food you provide makes a difference to one or two real people who may go to bed full rather than hungry. What Superman taught showed in "Christmas Around the World" is that we may not be able to solve a big problem, but we can help some of the people involved.

I think we would do more good if we shifted our focus from the big global problems we can't solve to the individual people we can help. Sponsor a child, provide a Thanksgiving Meal, write a check, give an hour of time. Do something small that helps one or two people and if enough of us do that, we'll make a dent in the big problems.

I had the privilege this week to do food sorting at the Idaho food bank. We had four large boxes full of food from a food drive, from the little bit that people were able to donate here and there. A little by everyone makes a lot.

Jesus told his disciples that "the poor you will have with you always" (Mark 14:6) This wasn't meant as a blithe acceptance of reality because he also told to help the poor. Rather the statement serves as a reminder that the problems of poverty will always be present on Earth because of the problems in the human condition. However, we can help those in poverty, if we don't let the bigness of the problem overwhelm us.