Misanthropy

It's a sad day when a child finally take off his cape, keeps away his action figures, and files away his comic books. I don't view those actions as growing up, maturing, or becoming an adult. Long before those trinkets of wonder were packed away in cardboard boxes and shuffled into basements, attics and garages, they knew. They knew that they couldn't outrun a speeding bullet, nor leap tall buildings in a single bound. They knew that they couldn't. They knew they never would be able to, and it was exactly the same for everyone else.

Comic book heroes are (for the most part), mankind at its best. Children grow up looking to these role models, using them as guide posts for behavior. For the longest time, they hold on to this hope. The hope that maybe, somewhere, far away, such a person truly exists. A person who embodies everything they hold sacred.

Flickers of humanity reinforce their beliefs. A man running into a burning building to save a stranger. A woman shielding her young with her own body. But slowly, day by day this hope starves, withers and eventually dies. There comes a point in their lives when they realize that it was all truly fiction. Not the glitz and the glam; the flying and the fighting. But mankind itself.

There are brief flickers of nobility and greatness, but then even the exceptional few who stepped out into the light for a moment revert to the age-old human tradition of egocentrism, bigotry and ignorance.

In sum. Bring on the cylons!