Suffice it to say, if it involves super powers it is
something that will capture my attention. Super heroes are the gingerbread
house that I just cannot avoid and always get sucked into. But not all super
powered characters are heroes. Nor are they villains. Some people with powers
are just regular individuals whose lives have been forever altered by the
knowledge they have this strange ability. An ability that seems to shape
everything about their lives.
I got to thinking about this while watching reruns of the
brilliant TV show Pushing Daisies. If you are unaware of this show (and you
missed out on something really great if you are), the show revolves a young
baker (The Pie Man aka Ned) who as a child discovered he had the power to bring
the dead back to life with just a touch. This ability to bring back the dead
has drawbacks though. For every thing he brings to life, something of equal
size or weight has to die. That is of course, if he allows them to live longer
than a minute. If he touches the dead again they return to being dead, unable
to be revived. This causes Ned to grow up mostly an orphan after he revives his
mother and then tragically kills her when she kisses him on the forehead. He
also brings back to life his beloved dog, whom he can never pet or touch for
fear the canine will die again. The series really gets going though when he
brings back to life his childhood crush who along with a detective helps him
solve murder cases.
As you watch the show you can see that all this death has
caused Ned to develop a fear of intimacy. Even when around the living, Ned
tends to keep his distance. Touch is the delivery system for his abilities. He
needs to focus on everything he touches. And so many of the things he touches
are dead. An accidental nudge and a former corpse is walking around. The
awesome power of life and death is in his hands. As one of my favorite heroes
said, with great power comes great responsibility. I can’t think of a power
greater than being able to control life.
One of my favorite tacklers of this topic of super powered
individuals is Mr. Stephen King. Kings work is full of individuals who through
some twist of fate or another have been given a strange ability. I’ll cite The
Dead Zone (book, movie, TV show, they all follow the same general plot) that
has a schoolteacher awaking from a coma with the ability to see a person’s life
(past, present, future) through touch. Tactile sense seems to be a popular
theme among these types of stories. As John Smith, the main character, tries to
live a normal life he is constantly forced into impossible situations due to
his “power”. 
The main feature of these ordinary individuals who gain some
sort of ability is that they all want to be rid of their ability. Their greatest
wish in life is to be simply normal. Most individuals dream of having something
that separates them from the rest of the herd of humanity, where the people in
these stories want nothing more than to go with the flow. For them, normality
is the greatest gift a person can have. Again, another King character who
perfectly exemplifies this is Carrie. Carrie wants so badly to be like the
other girls in her school but she is ostracized at first for her deeply
religious upbringing and then later for her destructive mental abilities. All she really wants is to fit in at school.
That seems to be the important point put across in all these
super power stories. No matter how badly you want to be like everyone else the
only way you will truly be happy is if you accept who you are. An important
lesson when you look at the world around you. With so much dissidence and
prejudice based on so many arbitrary lines, more people need to realize that it
is the differences that make people interesting, not the sameness.
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