SO LONG, KIMOSABE

Recent re-runs on one of our cable channels reminded me that the last of my boyhood heroes died years long ago. The Lone Ranger went to his eternal reward. And for those of us who spent hours on end pretending to be this masked man who saved the world from evil, it was a justifiable reward.

           

Back then it was easy to know right from wrong, hero from villain. The good guy wore a white hat; bad guys dressed in black, except maybe Hopalong Cassidy. It was all so simple and even so theologically correct: white for good and purity; bad for sin and evil. In the end, the good guys always won and the bad guys always lost. That's the way it was and that's the way it should always be.

           

What was even more fascinating was that the good guys, like the Lone Ranger, were like mythic heroes who rode into town, cleaned up the mess, and rode out before they could be properly honored. And no one knew who they really were. And that was just fine for it lent an aura to the belief that all we need is someone to save us from evil and all will be well, very well at that.

           

No more. Not only do we have a difficult time deciding who the good guys and the bad guys are because they all look alike, we make our heroes larger than life -- and they like it that way. They have flaws but we conveniently overlook them. Humility has gone the way of the masked man and the white hat.

           

That is not to say that the good old days of my youth were so wonderful and that these days pale in comparison. While it may have been wonderful to be able to easily separate bad from good, white from black, in hindsight it was not so simple. We made it that way because we wanted it that way. We knew who the enemy was and we named the enemy: sin, communism, the Democratic/Republican Party, you-name-it.

           

It may be comforting to be able to be able to categorize good from bad as easily as we did by the color of the hat a cowboy wore. But even then we knew it was not that simple. We just allowed ourselves to believe it was so that we did not have to think about it. It made for a simpler life style.

           

Now life is complicated, fast and confusing. But we still seem to need an enemy. We need to personify evil. If it wasn't Demon Rum, it was the hedonistic Zelda Fitzgerald and her Flapper friends. If it wasn't Hitler, it was Stalin. If it wasn't a person, it was communism. If it wasn't civil rights agitators, it was war protestors or women's libbers or gay-rights advocates.

           

But why do we need an enemy?  Pogo said that the enemy is us. Pogo was right. Each of us is our own worst enemy. Jesus came specifically to save us from ourselves, from believing that as long as we can find someone worse than we are, we are all right. Our hat may not be white, we say, but at least it is cleaner than someone else's. Wrong: it's still dirty.  No one wears a white hat save Jesus, who is the only one who truly saves.