If you are a parent , grandparent or loving care-giver, you can't help but worry about the moral values the entertainment media is trying to foster upon our very young : the claim that one has to be big and powerful and violent , a comic book styled Super Hero , to do good.
"Un-Super heroes" is an attempt to offer an alternative vision : to tell a true story from 1940s Gotham when agape love , not super hero violence, brought about as much good as this world has ever seen.
The original Penicillin - Penicillin G - remains naturally grown and hence un-patentable.
Because of that , it is that rarest of drugs - cheap, abundant , safe and highly effective and so it enabled the world to reduce those pools of long endemic deadly bacterial infections among the world's poorest and most powerless.
It greatly - and directly - benefitted the poor and weak of course.
But then , in a form of Herd Immunity , it also greatly benefitted all the rest of the world - indirectly - by cutting off the flow of deadly strains of common bacteria.
Diseases like Rheumatic Fever, long the leading cause of school age deaths (Polio killed comparatively few , by contrast) quickly became a word in a dusty history book , rather than the cause of your grandchild's death.
Ten billion of us - so far - have better healthier lives as a result of a series of miraculous events begun in Gotham City on October 16th 1940.
Dr Martin 'Henry' Dawson - himself dying from a terminal illness - gathered around him a tiny team of unfits and misfits.
That little team was dedicated to combatting the Allied consensus that natural penicillin was unfit to be used as a mainstream medicine - and that some unfit patients were to be Code Slowed to death , to better aid the war effort against Hitler.
Dr Dawson argued we can never really hope to beat Hitler by racing him to the moral bottom - killing off the unfit to aid the war effort was already well underway in Germany under the name of Aktion T4.
Our best rebuttal was to publicly demonstrating that we still care for our most weak and powerless --- even under the demands of Total War.
Dawson held off his own failing body and his own government just long enough to see his vision of abundant natural penicillin-for-all grip the global imagination .
So WWII, despite its terrible scenes of hunger and homelessness, did not see global epidemics like WWI's war-ending Spanish Flu that killed tens of millions.
Now is that epic enough a tale for a child raised to think that only mighty Batman is fit enough to save a world in woe ?
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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