What I'm Reading #7: Rising Stars (Michael Straczynski)

Rising Stars, by J. Michael Straczynski

I know, I know. Rising Stars is a comic book series. I'm expanding my geekdom. It's a great release after a long semester.

And this series was enjoyable. I won't give you the whole rundown, because there's one specific thing I want to talk about in regarding to this book, but basically, a mysterious flash--some sort of cosmic event--appears over Pederson, Illinois, and all the children who were in utero at the time were born with various powers. Some had super strength, others could fly, one could manipulate electrical energy, etc. Some became heroes a la Superman, others became public enemies a la the X-Men. But all of them spent a great deal of time using their abilities for selfish reasons until things got real and they realized they were meant to help the world. So the one with pyrokinesis burned down the world's cocaine fields, the strongest of them went about burying the entire world's nuclear weapon supply two miles under the North Pole, the woman whose power was that to anyone looking at her she was the most beautiful woman alive went on a fund-raising spree. It was cool.

There's plenty in Rising Stars about power and responsibility, but there was one particular exchange that struck me. When they began actually trying to help the world, one thing they did was to try to mediate international conflicts. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was, of course, a priority. One of the "Specials" (as they were called) planned to destroy the major religious symbols in Jerusalem--the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Wailing Wall, etc. This, she said, would give the people a common enemy and bring them together.

Another one of the Specials offered an alternative. What if, he said, instead of giving them a common enemy, we gave them a common--I don't know what he called it, maybe a common source of rejoicing? You see, the Special who planned to destroy the city's holy sites had the power of controlling small objects. This seemed useless until someone realized that the carotid artery is a small object, and she became an undetectable assassin. But her friend offered her a different task: use her powers to pull up the fertile soil from underneath the desert sand. She had just enough power to do it, and it killed her. But suddenly, for miles around Jerusalem, there was arable land. As the second Special had suggested, it became less pressing to fight over one small patch of land once there was so much fertile space around.

Obviously, that solution isn't plausible, but it made me think. Having a common enemy can be a powerful thing; but I wonder if a common source of gratitude and joy could be even stronger. It's too bad that not even the Abrahamic faiths can find that in God.