For no particular reason whatsoever, I’ve been thinking about good guys and bad guys, and about the persistent human narrative of good triumphing over evil.
It’s what we’re programmed to believe. The good guys come out on top. The daring, outmatched rebels in “Star Wars” blow up the Death Star. The Avengers save us from Galactus, the devourer of worlds. Grog vanquishes the evil prehistoric man Og, in a story I assume was painted with mud and a stick on a cave wall somewhere.
It’s that “tale as old as time” thing.
But for a while now, we Americans haven’t had the psychological balance that comes with good besting evil. I think it’s part of why a certain swath of the population that pays attention to what’s going on in the country has felt out of whack. The bad guys have been doing a lot of winning in recent years. And it feels incongruent.
The wrongness of the narrative has certainly been at the heart of my discomfort. I tell stories for a living. Stories are sometimes sad, sometimes tragic, but they almost always have a protagonist and an antagonist, and the damn antagonist is not supposed to come out on top.
We communicate via stories. We use stories to pass our history down through generations. If the bad guys were always winning, I think we would’ve found a less depressing way to communicate, frankly.
Nobody would want to learn their history through a bunch of stories where the jerks carry the day. At some point, maybe after evil Og beat the snot out of perfectly nice Grog for the 20th time or something, people would be like, “Geez, this is depressing, I don’t want to hear any more stories.”
As humans, to move forward, we need goodness and decency to overcome whatever badness and indecency is out there. And when we’re not seeing that happen, we feel deflated. Defeated. Uncentered.
The point of all this is that something good has happened in our nation’s narrative. The good guys, for the first time in a hot minute, have won. Not just won, actually, but dominated.
This is the story we want. This is the thing that makes us whole, gives us hope, pulls us to a place where the world feels more aligned.
It doesn’t mean the bad guys are gone. They always come back in some form or another. (If they didn’t, there would be no sequels, and that would be terrible for the movie industry.)
But as I breathe today, I breathe easier than I did earlier in the week. I again feel there’s ample reason to charge forward and believe the world around us can be made better. It’s like a fog lifted, and the story I’m living moved in the way I expect it to.
I hope you feel that too.
And I hope the next chapter, and all that follow, are better than the last.
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