Who'd Believe YOU'RE Daredevil?

WORD COUNT: 32,039

Blast it! I can hear a gnat blinking a hundred yards away, but I can't tell anything from a photograph! I'd almost forgotten that blindness is a … a handicap! Even for me!

Daredevil #205, cover dated April 1984

For those of my reading audience unfamiliar with comic books, Daredevil is a Marvel Comics superhero who trained himself to be the best possible athlete he can possibly be and set out to fight crime as a result of a promise he made to his father. And he's blind. But despite that, Daredevil CAN see because his other senses were irradiated to superhumanly compensate for his sight (as you could argue our remaining senses compensate for the loss of acuity in one of them, only Daredevil has these enhanced and augmented into a “radar sense” where he can perceive whatever or whoever is around him by the disturbance he, she, or it makes in the air. Heck, he's sensitive enough to detect whether someone is lying or getting ready to throw a punch based on their pulse.

By the time of Here Comes … Daredevil (ISBN 9780785152378) that I finished reading Monday, it's general knowledge that Daredevil's alter ego is Matt Murdock, a practicing attorney who also happens to be blind. He'd kept the secret for years, but a while before this story, Murdock got outed as Daredevil by a tabloid and it being hard in an era of Internet surveillance, Homeland Security, and DNA analysis to maintain a secret identity anyway, for a while he had to leave everything behind. Gradually the furor died down and the headline “MURDOCK IS DAREDEVIL” got replaced by the next big thing and plausible deniability took care of the rest (interesting, the OpenOffice program I'm using doesn't recognize the word deniability); who'd believe Daredevil is a blind guy?

And why do I bring this up? To show you that yes, I do read new books and try to keep up and also because I just loved the illustrations in this six-part story with a Mafia wedding, legal brouhahas, and a global money laundering ring (Daredevil's generally not known for the big-name villains) because it shows us – or tries to show us – how Matt Murdock/Daredevil “sees” by drawing whorls and patterns and pulses where you and I see light and color. (Sorry, to my knowledge no blogs of mine have been translated into Braille.) I also bring this up the day before Thanksgiving Day – it still feels weird that it's this early, the earliest calendar day it can possibly be, the twenty-second of November – because we have to remember that not all of us see the world the same way, or can.

Whoever we're able to get together with (if anybody) for the turkey and trimmings and dessert tonight – I know some people having Thanksgiving today as they can't have it tomorrow, no harm done – there is a reason all these people are there. From some of what I've heard going on and has happened in my area with my family the last few months, we may not all come together again. Today Sarah and Jeffrey are leaving school early to go with Sharon, Margaret, and Josceline to pick up Breanna from Bismarck and bring her over. Allan and Lesa with their kids are coming because this is “our year”, the one they have Thanksgiving with Lesa's parents at their house. Robert just got out of the hospital, that's all I can say about that. Breanna and another family member can't be in the same house for personal reasons.

I want to believe none of this affects me, but the truth is it does. I'm not sure I would be willing to give up sight as Matt Murdock did in order to “read” people better; some things I'm better off not knowing. But that gets me thinking of Lion-O from Thundercats who would look past what was in front of him to find out what he needed to know. “Sword of Omens, give me sight beyond sight.” There MUST be an equivalent of that when I pray, to see the world and its people, to see my family and its people, as God sees them and not just what I know of them. It's very easy to judge when you don't know. And the biggest thing that can come our way this Thanksgiving, not just for one day but for now and the time ahead is to see the loss, to see the hope, to see the victory that's got to happen like tomorrow's sunrise!

Happy Thanksgiving.

David