Captain America Speech

[ysabetwordsmith]

This is my favorite Captain America speech ever.  This is what it means to be a hero.  It's not about powers or publicity.  It's about integrity.  It's about observing the world until you understand what's wrong with it, figuring out a solution to some part of that, and applying yourself to it.  It's about deciding your own personal code of honor from which you will not deviate no matter what other people do or don't do.  Heroes take responsibility.  An unsullied hero like Cap is just not budgable on this point. 

Conversely, this is my iconic villain speech.  Villains tend to focus on what they can do more than what they should do, and what people will think about them.  They're in it for their own purposes, their own desires, rather than what is good or what is needed.  When things to wrong, they consistently try to lay the blame on someone else, anyone else.

Comments

[stardreamer]

That speech by Cap is lovely. But there's a catch... anyone can decide that they're in the position he's describing, where the whole country is going in the wrong direction and it's up to them to stand up and say, "No, YOU move." And right now the people who seem to be doing it the loudest are the anti-gay and anti-woman and anti-poor leaders. Every shred of social progress we made in the 20th century (or since) is, to them, an example of the country moving in the wrong direction, and they are fired up to be the person who stands athwart the path of equality and human rights and says, "No, YOU move."

(This is a common problem with that sort of inspirational speech. I can't read any of them without hearing them in the voices of people like James Dobson and Paul Ryan.)

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

The difference I see is that Cap talks about responsibility. Even if you don't already know who he is, it's there in the speech, that willingness to stand up, in public, and take the consequences if you're supporting an unpopular stance.

The zealots, a lot of them work in secret, behind closed doors, in trade deals and laws that nobody gets to read until they're passed. Even the ones who speak openly and make all the noise, they're not keen on responsibility. They always want to weasel out of the consequences. They want to get something for nothing.

Another major difference is integrity. Captain America's ideals and goals and actions and outcomes line up consistently. This is not the case with most zealots. They'll say one thing but do another.