The Never Ending Battle
If you’re like me, you’ve been thinking about Superman lately. To be fair, hardly a day has passed since I was 2-years-old that I didn’t think about Superman. There’s a lot to think about. The character is coming up on 85 years and has had multiple iterations from comics and Newspapers to radio, television, and movies. He has come to represent A number of things to generations around the world. A defender of the marginalized and bullied. A puncher of Nazis. Hope for anyone who earned a degree in journalism.
Over the decades, the writers for Superman’s various adventures have tried to come up with succinct, catchy labels that encapsulate all of the concepts that the character embodies. The one that I want to talk about today, dates back to the 1940s and has been used frequently when describing what The Man of Steel stands for. Since Superman’s early radio adventures, the character has been promoted with some variation, as fighting the “never-ending battle for truth Justice, and the American Way.”
This phrase has gotten a lot of attention over the years and has generated all manner of controversy. As an elected official, you might expect me to focus on the “American way” part of that tag line. The potential baggage that part brings, is why the comics have danced away from it in recent years, replacing it with “a better tomorrow”. That controversy though, is a trap and distracts from what I find to be the important meaning of the phrase. The part we should focus on, is that Superman fights a “never-ending battle.” In the quest for all of the optimistic and hopeful ideals that Superman stands for, there is no point at which he will stop working for those ideals. The only way to achieve victory, is to fight for those values tomorrow, no matter what happened today.
To elaborate, I’d like to turn to something almost as American as Superman, baseball. In his book, “Small Towns,” Charles L. Marohn, Jr. relates the concept of the infinite game. A baseball game as we know it, is finite, has a beginning and an end. There are rules for determining the winner because that is of course, the point; to win.
An infinite game though, can’t have a winner. If it never ends, there is never a time when the game is done and the score can be tallied. The goal shifts from winning, to surviving. A team wouldn’t be trying to defeat the opposing team, but support their own teammates.
Marohn brings up the infinite game as it relates to municipal infrastructure and the need for constant small maintenance rather than massive overhauls every few decades, but the point carries across examples. If perspective can be shifted from the finite to the infinite, it leads to a more supportive, collaborative, and productive environment. Victory doesn’t come in defeating the opponent. It comes from being able to keep playing the game.
We all have values that we will stand for. As possible variation, we all have values we will stand against. We do ourselves a disservice when we treat those conflicts as finite. The moment we stop playing, whether because we think we’ve won or lost, that’s when we have truly been defeated.
We’re finite beings, but values and ideas are infinite. We can’t ever assume victory because that leads to complacency. We are finite creatures playing an infinite game. The only way to be defeated, is to stop playing. Victory comes from supporting our team so that we can keep playing. We must all fight a never-ending battle.
