When I review television/streaming shows or movies I aim to do more than just describe why they’re good and if you should watch them or not. Those are definitely part of what I’m doing here, but what I really want to do is explore the way that the program in question explores ideas and concepts related to the principles of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and the precepts of liberty. While doing so I openly engage in spoilers, both in summarizing the main plot of the program in question and in addressing the themes and ideals the program promotes through its story. The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, Disney’s newest MCU show, has a great deal of these themes that are worth mining to discover the layers of meaning as it doesn’t shy away from issues of military violence, state propaganda aimed at civilians, poverty, political oppression, blowback, racism, hope, and friendship. After giving a basic synopsis of the show I then address each of these themes and how they are explored within the context of the show, comparing them to the ideals and ethics of Christianity and human liberty.
A Brief Synopsis
The show opens with Sam Wilson, The Falcon, having returned to working with the US military to take out known terrorists, in this case Batroc, who previously appeared in the opening action of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. One of the things that you’ll notice right off the bat is that there is a lot more killing in this series than in the movies. Neither Falcon, nor other characters later on, have any compunctions about killing. On a narrative level it makes sense. Their willing to kill others signals definitively that they aren’t heroes, they’re soldiers, and later when they do become (or in Falcon’s case re-assume the mantle of) heroes they stop killing their opponents. In this way the story draws a hard line between what is and is not heroic, a concept we will discuss again later in this review. After the opening excitement, we see Sam give Captain America’s shield to the Smithsonian for their extensive Captain America exhibit. He explains that there will never be another live Steve Rogers and that this was his symbol and deserves to be preserved and remembered as such.
In this first episode we also discover that Bucky, the Winter Soldier, has been trying to deal with the trauma he has from his decades as being a brainwashed murder machine for the Soviet state while also trying to atone for his many sins. Though he is seeing a therapist, removing Hydra agents from power, and befriending the survivors of those he killed, the reality is that none of it is working. He is isolated and unable to deal with his pain. Things only get worse as the US government reveals it has taken command of Captain America’s shield, christened a new Captain America (John Walker), and a group named the Flag-Smashers, led by a woman named Karli, are revealed as carrying out attacks on government repatriation offices managed by the Global Repatriation Council, tasked with re-settlement of those who returned at the end of Avengers: Endgame.
As the series goes on we discover a number of things. The Flag-Smasher leadership is composed of people who have gained access to a form of the Super-Soldier Serum, which gives them all immense strength and physical stamina. Sam and Bucky have to team up to bring them down. For story line reasons this requires them to help Baron Helmut Zemo escape prison so they can get access to the information he has on HYDRA’s work to replicate the Serum and create their own Captain HYDRA. In a show full of great actors and actresses, Daniel Brühl’s role as Zemo is absolutely the best. We discover that he is an anti-supremacist, believing that projects like the Serum and groups like the Avengers threaten the basic independence and liberty of humans who don’t have god-like superpowers, making him sound a lot like the Lex Luthor that DC has been completely incapable of creating in any of their movies. He views all super-humans as a threat and fears that their proliferation would only lead to human subservience, which makes me wonder if Zemo also watches Star Trek. Zemo agrees to help not only for his freedom, but because he wants to destroy all traces of the Serum and its creation, forever.
At the same time we see John Walker, chosen to be the new Captain America because of his military record as a three time Medal of Honor winner, is slowly coming unglued. He can’t handle the pressures of being a living symbol. After a fight with the Flag-Smashers which destroys all the remaining vials of serum except one which Walker secretly takes, he injects himself with the Serum and gains superhuman abilities, but at the cost of what remained of his self-control. At the same time, the Flag-Smasher leader, Karli, who starts out committing non-lethal attacks against GRC offices in order to get resources for her own people, gets more and more violent and more and more willing to murder anyone in her way. After the death of his partner, Walker goes into a rage and murders a Flag-Smasher in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses. Again and again we see those exposed to the Serum are corrupted by it and become more and more given to outbursts of homicidal rage. On a side note, this may actually explain why the Hulk is such a rage monster as he is also the result of an experimental attempt to recreate the Super-Soldier Serum that fails, as shown in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk movie, but back to The Falcon and Winter Soldier.
As all these events come to a head Sam faces a dual personal crisis with his family and the discovery that the US government had experimented for decades on a black man named Isaiah Bradley. Bradley had been a soldier in the 1950s who, during the Korean War, was given the Serum along with his platoon all of whom died except for him. He was then sent to hunt down and kill the Winter Soldier. When his platoon was captured he went to save them after which he was arrested, imprisoned, and experimented on for the next thirty years. I love this element of the story a sit mimics the story of Captain America: The First Avenger where Steve does the same, but with one crucial difference: Isaiah Bradley was a black man in a segregated America. His going AWOL gave the military the perfect excuse it needed to arrest him and make him disappear. After thirty years of secret, illegal experimentation by American scientists no one could understand why the Serum worked on him and Steve Rogers (though Isaiah’s version does seem less perfect as he still continued to age at a regular pace). Isaiah only finally escaped in the 1980s after a nurse helped him fake his own death. Sam is thus forced to confront two questions: What does it mean to be Captain America as a black man and what does it mean to be a hero if he can’t help his family? Answering these becomes the crux of his emotional journey. At the same time, Bucky begins to learn what it really means to make amends and begin his healing process through his friendship with Sam, which really begins to grow after Bucky shows up to help Sam and his family re-build the family fishing boat.
Along the way to the finale we end up in Madripoor, a very nice addition to the MCU, where we find out that after Captain America: Civil War, Sharon Carter was burned by the US government and basically had to live on the run. She ended up in Madripoor and has built a power base there for herself which she uses to help Bucky and Sam hunt down the Serum and the Flag-Smashers. Ultimately, things come to a head as the Flag-Smashers attempt to kidnap the GRC leaders only to be foiled by Sam, now embracing the Captain America identity, Bucky, and Sharon. Meanwhile, Walker, who has been dismissed from being Captain America and dishonorably discharged, manages to fall, if not up then sideways, when he is recruited to be the US Agent by la Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine and gets a minor part in the final battle against the Flag-Smashers, the survivors of which are secretly killed by Sharon Carter. In the end, Sam explains that he took the shield and the role of Captain America because after 500 years of being here and working to build this nation America belonged to him and his people as much as it did anyone else and that he hoped to represent the way America could do better for everyone together.
Themes and Principles
Military Violence
There are a lot of people in this show suffering from the results of military violence. The most obvious is John Walker as he is already coming apart at the seams before getting exposed to the Serum. In one episode he remarks that the things that he had to do in Afghanistan in order to win his three Medal of Honor awards felt a long way from being right and then he proves it when he murders a defenseless and surrendered Flag-Smasher with the Captain America shield. In fact, there is a solid argument to be made here that the show does more than comment on military violence but really addresses the issue of state violence altogether.
No matter how many times John Walker tries to convince himself what he is doing is right, no matter how often Americans ignore the actually violence they unleash on the populations of other nations by simply ignoring the bloodshed it causes, the truth is still the truth. What so horrifies everyone when Walker murders the Flag-Smasher in broad daylight isn’t just the overwhelming violence of it all, but the revelation of truth that it is – Walker is only doing in public what had already won him the highest awards and accolades he could ever hope to be given when he did it in secret. Walker is disavowed her not because of the violence he did, which America approved of beforehand, but because he made them pay attention to what the state and military are actually doing, which no American wants to acknowledge. He removed the cloak for their sins and they didn’t like the truth that revealed.
You also see it with Bucky as well. He is constantly haunted by the assassinations, violence, and murders he carried out as the Winter Soldier. No amount of being told that he was brainwashed and doing it for Mother Russia, something Walker and Americans in general are also subject to if only in different ways, can’t hide the truth when Bucky is forced to realize it and acknowledge it. Once his eyes are opened he realizes he can’t fix anything or make it better. He can’t change the past and the evils of his actions are slowly destroying him. Once you see the violence of the State for what it truly is, no amount of patriotic propaganda is going to allow you to ignore what is really happening and the cruelty, evil, and corruption that sits at the heart of the American government. Even Sharon understands this, which is why she turns against the American state. After being burned by it she is forced to realize that what she worked for was not what she was taught to believe and now, like every person who has lost their faith in their faith in the god of their childhood, she has turned into a sort of state atheist, out for herself. For all of them a major part of their problem isn’t just the violence they’ve done but the disillusionment it has caused as it has wiped away the statist lies that justified it and left them abandoned to realize what they have really done and why they have really done it – for the power, wealth, and hegemony of those who wield power in the upper echelons of the government and their politically connected cronies.
The final episode does a great job of highlighting the power of language and pointing out the way that those in power manipulate language to legitimize their oppression and to justify their violence against any who question or hesitate to comply while also pointing out the true source of power. It comes in an exchange between Sam Wilson, now Captain America, and the GRC leaders. Sam says:
You have to stop calling [the Flag-Smashers] terrorists. [Why?] Your peacekeeping troops carrying weapons are forcing millions of people into settlements around the world, right? What do you think those people are gonna call you? These labels, ‘terrorist,’ ‘refugee,’ thug,’ they’re often used to get around the question. Why? I mean, this girl died trying to stop you, and no one has stopped for one second to ask why. You’ve gotta do better, Senator. You’ve gotta step up. Because if you don’t, the next Karli will. And you don’t wanna see 2.0. People believed in her cause so much, that they helped her defy the strongest governments in the world. Why do you think that is? Look, you people have just as much power as an insane god… or a misguided teenager. The question you have to ask yourself is, ‘How are you going to use it?’
The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, Ep. 6 “One World, One People“
Pointing out that terms like “terrorist” is just pure propaganda and that government employed soldiers and “peacekeeping troops” are terrorizing people and are indistinguishable from the “terrorists” themselves was not something I was expecting from a series made for mass consumption. It does an amazing job of tying state military violence to the propaganda used to justify it.
State Propaganda
It goes without saying that John Walker is a walking piece of propaganda. More so than Steve Rogers ever was because Rogers was more than willing to disobey his orders when he believed they were wrong. Rogers believed in individual liberty and freedom. He supported the US government when he believed its actions protected those things and defied it when he believed its actions violated those ideals. Walker is a soldier. He obeys orders, does what he is told, and “fights for his country.” He isn’t loyal to ideals, he is loyal to state organizations (unless you call subservience to the state an ideal), and when he becomes a risk they get rid of him. While he is Captain America those in power send him around on nationwide tours and film his exploits to use as fodder for propaganda aimed at the American masses. If they love and follow Walker, and Walker loves and follows those in power, then those in power have another effective tool by which to manipulate the masses. He becomes another statist symbol for the Death Cult of the State.
There are plenty who want to pretend that all the military demonstrations before sports games, public singing of the national anthem and all the ritual standing/saluting that goes with it, military funding of pro-war movies, and having children say the Pledge of Allegiance, among many other things, are all anything but pure propaganda, but pure propaganda ll these things are. From childhood the state indoctrinates us with its ideals and values, teaches us that without it and its power all would be chaos and insanity, and then it constantly reinforces those ideals through TV, movies, art, music, and public rituals. Hero worship of soldiers, to the point that we treat becoming pay murderers for those in power and surrendering all liberty to become an obedient tool of those who command you as if it were a great act of “service” to humanity instead of an adoration of reigning with blood and horror upon the Earth, is another piece of state propaganda in the Death Cult of the State. John Walker is just one great example of how we glorify the thugs who kill on command in order to maintain the position of those in power from facing the consequences of their actions. We are all subject to state indoctrination and propaganda and breaking free of it is one of the hardest but most important things we can do. Otherwise we all end up like John Walker, compromising our ethics, morality, and what we know to be right in order to be able to obey those in power.
Poverty and Political Oppression
The show doesn’t shy away from acknowledging poverty and the problems that cause poverty as well. Isaiah Bradley, the only man other than Bucky and Steve Rogers who has taken the Serum without losing his mind in some significant way, lives in a broken down house in a broken down part of town. Sam’s sister is trying to sell the family fishing boat because it is too broke down to repair and she can’t pay back her home loans. And, despite being a world renown superhero, Sam can’t get a loan from the bank for her. The most drastic form of poverty in the show, and its truest expression as calling someone who owns a house and a person who can’t afford to make the payments on their boat poor is stretching the words poor and poverty to the point that they lose any meaning, is the poverty suffered by the displaced in the GRC camps/resettlement areas. These people suffer because after everyone wiped out by Thanos begin to return it becomes a question of what to do with all the people now living in the homes and holding the jobs of the returnees. Of course the government’s answer is to force the people now living in those homes and holding those jobs out of their jobs and homes, to give these to the people who were “snapped” in Avengers: Infinity War, and relocate all the new dispossessed people into state managed facilities where they’re promised they will be cared for by those in power.
To anyone with a basic understanding of economics and the failures of Socialism it is thus no surprise that the entire system falls apart. Even assuming everyone in the Global Repatriation Council (GRC) has good intentions it becomes clear that it is incapable of doing the job it has been given because the job itself is impossible. Distance from those suffering causes their political lords to be callous about how those suffering are treated and because these political masters are not omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent they have no ability to know what all the needs of those in the resettlement facilities have and no power to provide for them. Like all Socialist organizations, the central planners of the GRC imagine it can solve problems that are actually too complex for anyone or any group of people to fix, running afoul of what in economics is known as the Knowledge Problem.
As a result they mismanage resources, wasting goods, services, and wealth, cost people homes and jobs, create poverty where there would be less or none at all, and harm and destroy the lives of billions in the process. Along with this comes political oppression. Any time anyone other than you believes that he or she is so wise that he or she can dictate to you what to think, what to say, what kind of work you can do, where you can live, what you must eat and drink, what you can never eat or drink, in short, how you have to live your life, and then they enforce those dictates through law, you’re suffering from political oppression. The more extensive and expansive the laws, the deeper and more brutal the political oppression. Of course, the natural reaction to this is violence.
Blowback
It is therefore no surprise that the Flag-Smashers emerge from one of these resettlement camps. Socialism always creates such destruction, anger, and death. Centralization of power always leads to oppression and suffering. The more powerful the State becomes, the more power the government exercises to control the lives of the people, the more violence and domination they’re exposed to and the less liberty and prosperity they have and the more poverty and misery they suffer. Eventually, after being subjected to such life-crushing oppression and violence people are going to strike back, using violence to rebel against violence. In other words, it creates blowback, the unintended consequences of an action by the government that creates as much, if not more, harm than the issue the original action was intended to solve. The most famous example of blowback in the real world are the 9/11 terrorist attacks, carried out by the attackers in response to the presence of American military activities in the Middle East. Just read what Osama bin Laden himself said about why they carried out the 9/11 strikes:
Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom. If so, then let him explain to us why we don’t strike for example – Sweden? And we know that freedom-haters don’t possess defiant spirits like those of the 19 – may Allah have mercy on them.
No, we fight because we are free men who don’t sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours. No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.
That is blowback. And so are the Flag-Smashers. The arrogant Socialists of the GRC thought they could play God with the lives of millions of people and only succeeded in destroying their lives, inciting anger and hatred against the nations of the planet, and fomenting a grassroots rebellion against them that reacted to increase violence and despair with increasing violence and anger of its own. All of which culminates in the leaders of the GRC nearly being killed for their arrogance and stupidity until Bucky and Sam save them from the Flag-Smashers at the last moment. Did the GRC ever intend to create such violent resistance? Did the GRC even see itself as evil or wrong? Of course not. But that is what makes it blowback. The people running the GRC see themselves as acting for the “greater good,” the “common good,” and all the rest of those collectivist justifications made by people to justify their destroying people’s lives. The unintended consequence, the unanticipated result, is that those people would organize and fight back by any means necessary to achieve what they see as the true great good, the real common good. Thus the cycle of hubris driven violence and hatred continues.
On the topic of the Flag-Smashers, I want to take a minute to correct an error I see commonly online. The Flag-Smashers aren’t anarchists of any sort. They never call for the dismantling of the State or the destruction of the machinery of the State. Their complaint is that the world is divided up into smaller nations all of which are seeking after their own good instead of uniting under a common, universal rule for the good of all. This is turn leads to some, such as themselves suffering, while others in power do what they want. It isn’t that power the Flag-Smashers protest, merely the way that it functions. The problem isn’t the power, it is how divided people see themselves and the way that leads them to benefit smaller groups (nations) when it should benefit everyone. It isn’t the state the Flag-Smashers protest, merely the way it functions. They demand it treat everyone as if they were all members of the same world state. In other words, the Flag-Smashers are globalists, and the implementation of their ideas would lead to a one world government led by a one world state that they believe would unite and govern everyone equally as members of the super-state. One world. One People. This is the very opposite of anarchism as it calls for the total dismantling of the State altogether. Anarchists aren’t merely against what they see as a poorly function government, they believe the State itself is broken and needs to be dismantled entirely and replaced with nothing.
Racism
I admire greatly the way that this show addresses racism. The story of Isaiah Bradley does a great job of using his fictional biography to draw attention to the actual history of immoral, unethical, and racist medical experimentation on black people. The scene where Bucky and Sam are stopped by the police where Bucky is given more deferential treatment whereas Sam is treated as an automatic threat until the police recognize Sam as Falcon is a great example of how the police treat people differently based on their race, especially when you’re black. The show has a running joke in which Sam is called Black Falcon because he is a black man, which calls attention to comic conventions that named black characters as “Black _________,” (see: Black Panther, Black Manta, Black Lightning, etc.) Then of course there is Sam’s consternation over whether he should take on the role of Captain America, not just because of his respect for Steve Rogers but because of the complexities, histories, and issues tied up in being a black man in America and making yourself a representative of all those things by becoming a living symbol of American ideals. Finally, there is the fact that Walker, like so many killer cops before him, gets caught committing murder and never faces serious repercussions.
I know some critics have argued that it should have done more to address racism, but I vehemently disagree. In entertainment you have to walk the line. If your message is too light then it will never get across. If it is too heavy then people will dismiss it as sermonizing. The key is to find the sweet spot where you use entertaining stories to get people to open their eyes and be open to the message without triggering their defensiveness. In this regard I think the show did an excellent job. It had just the right touch to reach people who weren’t already open to learning about the issues of race and racism that still exist in the United States.
All of the above said, there is an aspect of racism here that the show dealt with that is largely ignored – the issue of supremacist ideology. A supremacist believes that some group – whether it be based on ethnicity, age, race, sex, work, wealth, culture, etc. – is superior to others and therefore better than others. Thinking supremacy is possible is the root of every prejudicial ideology on the planet, whether it be nativist, nationalist, racist, or sexist. As Dr. Ron Paul has so succinctly explained, “Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans only as members of groups and never as individuals. Racists believe that all individual who share superficial physical characteristics are alike; as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. …We should understand that reducing racism requires a shift from group thinking to an emphasis on individualism.” Needless to say, this idea of collectivist supremacist ideology being at the heart of bigotry and prejudice of every kind is ignored by most media and activists, the majority of whom are so busy hacking away at the branches that they fail to strike the root of the problem. But The Falcon and The Winter Soldier does deal with the root problem. Enter Baron Helmut Zemo.
Baron Zemo, was the villain of Captain America: Civil War and is the most successful antagonist in a Marvel movie to date. His plan to shatter the Avengers worked and contributed directly to the victory of Thanos in Infinity War and, thereby, to Endgame as well. And while Thanos’s victory was eventually reversed, Zemo’s never was, to the point that the Avengers apparently dissolved after Endgame. In Civil War, Zemo explains that as his family was destroyed during the fight between the Avengers and Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron, he has set out to destroy the Avengers from within. They are an “empire” which he must topple forever. In The Falcon and The Winter Soldier we get more of the ideology that motivates Zemo, something beyond the pure desire for revenge for his dead family. Commenting on Bucky’s admiration for Steve Rogers and what he represented, Zemo says:
You must have really looked up to Steve. But I realized something when I met him. The danger with people like him, America’s Super Soldiers, is that we put them on pedestals. They become symbols. Icons. And then we start to forget about their flaws. From there, cities fly, innocent people die, movements are formed, wars are fought. You remember that, right? As a young soldier sent to Germany to stop a mad icon. Do we want to live in a world full of people like the Red Skull?
The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, Ep. 3 “The Power Broker“
When talking about the Flag-Smashers and their leader Karli who have taken the Super-Soldier Serum:
The desire to become a superhuman cannot be separated from supremacist ideals. Anyone with that serum is inherently on that path. She [Karli] will not stop. She will escalate until you are forced to kill her. Or she kills you. …No matter what you saw in her, she’s gone. And we cannot allow that she and her acolytes become yet another faction of gods amongst real people. Super Soldiers cannot be allowed to exist. …The desire to become a superhuman cannot be separated from supremacist ideals.
The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, Ep. 4 “The Whole World Is Watching”
These quotes get at the truth of the matter. Those who desire power, to elevate themselves beyond other mortal men, to have power to force their personal ideology on the masses in some urge towards utopia, to re-write the world in their own image through the exercise of violence and power, they are supremacists. This is true no matter if you’re talking about a fictional Super-Soldier Serum or the way that modern governments empower people to force their will on others under the color of law and by overwhelming violence. All of it is supremacist ideology, stemming from the belief that your way of thinking, acting, and living is so far beyond, above, and superior to all others that you’re justified in beating, caging, and killing whoever refuses to be converted to what you believe and how you live. This initiates a cycle of violence as you try and force your beliefs on everyone else through the mechanism of government rule and the public resists by continuing to live as they believe even though you have labelled this “crime.” As Zemo notes, the only way to escapes this constant escalation towards oppression and destruction is to eliminate supremacist ideology altogether. As Dr. Paul explains further in the article I have already quoted, this can only be accomplished through changing the way we think, going from collectivist group thinking to individualism, liberty, and free markets.
Hope and Friendship
For all the importance all the above themes have in the overall story of the show, the central themes of the program are hope and friendship. At the start of the series all the main characters are in miserable places. Sam isn’t a hero and doesn’t really know what to do with himself, so he defaults to his previous experience as a soldier and starts working with the military. He doesn’t believe in himself so he gives up the shield to the Smithsonian, turning one of the world’s most potent symbols into a museum piece. He is disconnected from his family and those who love him most. Bucky is haunted by the demons of his actions and every night is tortured by all the evil he did without his own volition. He is trying to correct the wrongs that he can, but for all the good that he is doing he can’t escape the truth that at this point it is merely damage control. We see him sleeping at home on the floor because even after the better part of a century he hasn’t yet come home from the War. He is angry, sullen, and depressed – isolated and isolating. Later in the show, Sharon Carter is in an even worse position as she lost everyone and everything after being burned by the government and has, in her own isolation, become cynical and bitter.
What changes all this is the power of friendship. Bucky and Sam start off not being able to stand each other and have a real Lethal Weapon vibe to their relationship. Bucky is very much too old for any of this stuff. But things begin to change as they work together, struggle together, suffer together, triumph together, and fail together. One of the beautiful pieces of writing in this series is the way that as the tension ratchets up and the action gets bigger the relationships get deeper, they begin to open up to one another, and become more vulnerable to one another. They serve each other, an especially notable example of which is Bucky helping Sam and his sister rebuild the family boat. This in turn helps Sam reconnect with his sister and nephews, repairing their frayed family ties. Their friendship feels organic as a result, an outgrowth of who they are and their relationship. Because they find meaning in friendship and family and realign their priorities to focus on those things they begin to rediscover that there is meaning, and purpose, and good in life again.
One of my favorite things about this movie is how it taps back into Sam’s history as a counselor who helped soldiers with PTSD. It comes up repeatedly as he tries to help Karli and Bucky with their trauma. He hopes that if he is given enough time he can convince Karli and the Flag-Smashers to abandon their path of escalating violence and work for a peaceful solution to their problem. Because of various events he never is able to do so, one of his regrets for the entire show. On the other hand, after he and Bucky open up to one another, he is able to counsel Bucky and help him to realize what he needs to do in order to truly begin the healing process. When Bucky protests that he has been doing the work to make amends for his past, Sam confronts him with a little “tough love,” saying:
No, you weren’t amending, you were avenging. You were stopping all the wrongdoers you enabled as the Winter Soldier because you thought it would bring you closure. You go to these people and say “sorry” because you think it’ll make you feel better, right? But you gotta make them feel better. You gotta go to them and be of service. I’m sure there’s at least one person in that book who needs closure about something, and you’re the only person who can give it to them.
The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, Ep. 5 “Truth”
It isn’t enough to merely make amends, you have to be of service. Do what it takes even if it is excruciating. What Sam is talking about is the repentance process and the incredible power found within even a secularized version of it. It may be hard, it may feel like torture, but there is hope for Bucky and his future if he is willing to do what it takes, the hard work necessary for it. And he does, he can, because he has his friends there to support him, friends like Sam.
Sam becoming Captain America is also an act of hope, a statement about his deep seated belief about the future. When he is told that he doesn’t understand the “complexities” of the problems facing the GRC, he responds:
I’m a Black man carrying the stars and stripes. What don’t I understand? Every time I pick this up, I know there are millions of people out there who are gonna hate me for it. Even now, here, I feel it. The stares, the judgment. And there’s nothin’ I can do to change it. Yet I’m still here. No super serum, no blond hair, or blue eyes. The only power I have is that I believe we can do better. We can’t demand that people step up if we don’t meet them halfway.
The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, Ep. 6 “One World, One People“
Why does he choose to wield the shield, this symbol of every good and bad thing that America represents? Because he believes America can do better if we start helping one another and meeting each other halfway. He accepts the evils of the past but wants to stand as a hope for a better tomorrow for everyone. His assuming the mantle of Captain America is fundamentally an act of hope about the world to come and his ability to influence it for the good.
Final Thoughts
I really enjoyed this series. Despite some swearing and the violence, I found a great deal in it worthy of admiration. The story is well told and, just as importantly, the messages it communicates are good. It contains many themes and principles that a Christian would do well to put into practice in his or her life, especially one who fashions his or her self as a Latter-day Saint. Recognize the inability of violence to make the world a better place. Reject the lies the government promulgates to justify itself and maintain its hegemony. Don’t be deceived by government propaganda. Reject supremacist ideology of all sort, including racism, sexism, nationalism, and statism (state-ism). Embrace the power of repentance and serving your enemies as the way to change their hearts and minds, to win friends instead of excommunicating them from your life. Service, kindness, and friendship are the most powerful tools humans have to radically transform the world. Maintain hope, not matter how dark things become. Rely on family and those you love. Do what is right and good, then let the consequences follow. As Sam takes upon himself the name of Captain America and thereby becomes a living symbol of the ideals and values of individualism, liberty, and freedom that Americans supposedly treasure, likewise take upon yourself the name of Christ and become a conduit for His light, His truth, and His values so that it may cut through the darkness and illuminate the world.