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Monday, November 3, 2014

Is Super-Hero violence the only way to "do good" ?

If you are a parent , grandparent or loving care-giver, you can't help but worry about the moral values the entertainment media is trying to foster upon our very young : the claim that one has to be big and powerful and violent , a comic book styled Super Hero , to do good.

"Un-Super heroes" is an attempt to offer an alternative vision : to tell a true story from 1940s Gotham when agape love , not super hero violence, brought about as much good as this world has ever seen.

The original Penicillin - Penicillin G - remains naturally grown and hence un-patentable.

Because of that , it is that rarest of drugs - cheap, abundant , safe and highly effective and so it enabled the world to reduce those pools of long endemic deadly bacterial infections among the world's poorest and most powerless.

It greatly - and directly - benefitted the poor and weak of course.

But then , in a form of Herd Immunity , it also greatly benefitted all the rest of the world - indirectly - by cutting off the flow of deadly strains of common bacteria.

Diseases like Rheumatic Fever, long the leading cause of school age deaths (Polio killed comparatively few , by contrast) quickly became a word in a dusty history book , rather than the cause of your grandchild's death.

Ten billion of us - so far - have better healthier lives as a result of  a series of miraculous events begun in Gotham City on October 16th 1940.

Dr Martin 'Henry' Dawson - himself dying from a terminal illness - gathered around him a tiny team of unfits and misfits.

That little team was dedicated to combatting the Allied consensus that natural penicillin was unfit to be used as a mainstream medicine - and that some unfit patients were to be Code Slowed to death , to better aid the war effort against Hitler.

Dr Dawson argued we can never really hope to beat Hitler by racing him to the moral bottom - killing off the unfit to aid the war effort was already well underway in Germany under the name of Aktion T4.

Our best rebuttal was to publicly demonstrating that we still care for our most weak and powerless --- even under the demands of Total War.

Dawson held off his own failing body and his own government  just long enough to see his vision of abundant natural penicillin-for-all grip the global imagination .

So WWII, despite its terrible scenes of hunger and homelessness, did not see global epidemics like WWI's war-ending Spanish Flu that killed tens of millions.

Now is that epic enough a tale for a child raised to think that only mighty Batman is fit enough to save a world in woe ?

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