April 30--It seems America could benefit from some Avengers assembling.
Superheroes like Iron Man, Black Widow, Captain America and the gang -- with a shout of "Avengers assemble!" -- always know how to solve the problems regular folks like us can't fix.
Take the tragic death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who suffered a fatal spinal injury while in Baltimore police custody, and the tumultuous rioting that ensued. How did we nonsuperheroes react?
Everyone sprinted to their preferred ideological camps and followed the script that gets rolled out whenever deeply rooted tensions and frustrations violently erupt.
Some blame the people looting and rioting while ignoring the circumstances that cause such anger to build.
Some blame the police for being too confrontational while ignoring the difficult and delicate balance between keeping the peace and allowing free expression.
Some shout that it's the erosion of family values. Or the result of a criminal justice system that imprisons a disproportionate number of black men. It's economics. It's personal responsibility. It's education.
Then somebody like Donald Trump comes along and says something inflammatory, like this helpful tweet: "Our great African American President hasn't exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!"
And someone like MSNBC's Chris Hayes tweets this gem which, while accurate, overlooks his and his network's own culpability: "When West Baltimore *isn't* rioting, the national media, by and large, could not possibly care less what's happening there."
The problem is there are nuggets of truth in all these things, with the exception of Trump's blathering. But we don't seem capable of gathering those bits of truth up and figuring out what to do with them.
That's why we need the Avengers. They would stop crooked cops before anything bad happened, round up looters and bring them to justice, clean up a wrecked city and find a way to bring about peace.
That's why we love superheroes. They're able to do the things we can't seem to manage. Not just flying and shooting energy blasts from their hands, but actually fixing things, saving the world, rising above politics and partisanship and getting stuff done.
The Avengers are coming, but only in cinematic form. The arrival of the movie "Avengers: Age of Ultron" will save us only from thinking about the problems that gave rise to riots in places like Baltimore and Ferguson, protests in Staten Island after the death of Eric Garner and more recent protests against police violence in cities from Los Angeles to Chicago.
The Baltimore riots broke out Monday night. The city was relatively calm Tuesday night. The new blockbuster superhero movie premieres Thursday night.
That's more than enough time for our attention to shift. We'll feel we yelled, tweeted, prayed or shook our heads hard enough about the situation in Baltimore that we can now tiptoe away and get pumped to see the Hulk smash some stuff.
And the next time a situation like the one in Baltimore pops up, we'll follow the same script -- ideologically divided, momentarily concerned and inevitably distracted.
President Barack Obama said something about the situation in Baltimore that, if his detractors would calm down long enough to consider, makes a great deal of sense:
"I think there are police departments that have to do some soul searching. I think there are some communities that have to do some soul searching. But I think we, as a country, have to do some soul searching. This is not new. It's been going on for decades.
"And without making any excuses for criminal activities that take place in these communities, what we also know is that if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty ... where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men; communities where there's no investment, and manufacturing has been stripped away; and drugs have flooded the community, and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks ...
"In those environments, if we think that we're just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and as a society saying, 'What can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity?' then we're not going to solve this problem. And we'll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away, and then we go about our business as usual."
We can't solve all these problems. We're not superheroes. But perhaps we should envy their world-saving skills a bit less and emulate them, using our regular human talents, a bit more.
Perhaps it doesn't take superpowers to be an Avenger. Maybe all it takes is a willingness to assemble.
rhuppke@tribpub.com
