Nemesis

Nobody in real life has an arch enemy.  This is not for lack of trying, we are said to be our own worst enemy and frequently have trouble getting out of our own ways.  A real person, who goes out of their way, plans diligently, ruthlessly to foil our every move, escapes the list of night stalking bumps.  Are we that self-consumed that we don't have time to make life difficult for some one else?  Sure, we are consumed in the other direction where love is concerned, but why not hate.  Why not a focused, all consuming hate?  It is a scenario played out in the pulps and comic mags, heroes and villains wrapped in mortal combat, pitting their minds and strength against each other.  If can be played out in our imaginations, why not in reality?  Have we not all done wrong or felt the need for revenge?  Is there not a bully or mean girl deserving of this kind of attention?  If I did have an arch enemy would not the converse then be that I am the hero?  What wherewithal I might have to sustain enmity surely would fall short of will to manage heroics.  The fiction requires a happy ending, one in which the hero wins and the villain loses.  Might reality have that same scenario and therefore a visible lack of villains.  Fiction affords the hero with a purpose to fight the villain.  His sole purpose, which without, the hero would have no other daily necessity other than to live happily ever after, yet one wonders.  Who is behind the curtain, pulling the strings, weaving the skein of our destinies?  Do our feet fail or does the sidewalk jump up to meet us?  In the fiction, a secret identity protects hero and villain or a life by extreme or nefarious means.  Most of our lives are modest, unencumbered by the trappings required to fund one or the other.  The collective thinks it can indemnify some things:  breast cancer, genocide, cholera, malaria.  This is not the same.  The mosquito is not mounting a single-minded attack on the human race, it is merely out surviving us within its habitat.  Isn't breast cancer a form of cell damage caused by environmental factors we create, free radicals we eat or subscribe to, faulty genes from progenitors?  Who is the enemy?  It has been all to easy for the collective, the axis of evil, Hitler, Stalin, the Cold War, the War on Terrorism.  The selection process seems political, another collective.  Without an enemy, we are responsible for our own actions, we are the captains of our own ships.  We sail at the mercy of the wind but she is not a tempest seeking to destroy us.  The world and the other species in it are benign to this kind of interaction.  We are only capable of such thought and therefore such behavior, so why don't we? Maybe we do, in a less dramatic form, played out over a life time of cruelty or indifference, neglect or abuse.  Our idea of evil will have the stamina for this, but then so to will the converse, good.  A pair of tights and a mask go a long way towards letting me know who's side you belong to.  So buck up, hike up those boots and tighten that mask, so I may know mine enemy.  And know that when you walk off the page I will be ready.