Jeter and his own personal Professor X

I recently went to the movies to see one of this summer's blockbuster films, X Men:First Class (excellent movie, by the way). This film is more than just a reboot of the last generation of X Men films, it shows us the origins of Professor X, Magneto, etc. I do not claim to be an X Men fan, yet the story lines were all done extremely well. I finally know what averted the Bay of Pigs disaster!!! There are two central themes to the X Men films that I want to highlight (and which I feel make the X Men comics so interesting. The first being the notion that it is ok to be different. The second (and what I will focus on in this blog is the battle between people being innately good or evil.

For those that know the X Men stories, Professor X (leader of the good) believes that all men are innately good and that we should do good just because. We should "be the better man" at times even when someone wrongs us. This is contrasted by Magneto (leader of the bad) who believes that man kind is evil and must be destroyed. Now he doesn't come out of left field with this notion. He was fairly wronged as a child. He sees how men look at him and his fellow mutants (or people that are different) and does not approve. He thinks men should be punished for how they treat others that are mutants (different).

As soon as I got out of my car and turned on the radio following the movie I turned on WFAN (NYC sports talk radio) to hear a debate concerning Derek Jeter. For those of you who don't know, Jeter just collected his 3,000 hit. To make this storybook moment even more "perfect", it happened to be a home run. So how does this relate to X Men you ask? How could a Yankee ever be spoken in the same sentence as a good guy? hmm...

Today's Jeter controversy stems from the young man who caught the historic ball. This young man, a 23 year old kid, (with tons of student loans) caught the ball and was quickly ushered away by Yankee Stadium security. Supposedly the Yankees offered him memorabilia, great Yankee tickets for the rest of the year, etc. All in an attempt to get their hands on the ball - a ball on its way to Cooperstown. Now, this ball sounds like it would be welcome a starting bid of $250,000 on the market. That is a nice lil sum to help pay off those student loans! So what did the young man choose to do???

Young Mr. Christian Lopez asked for nothing, and took nothing. All he wanted was for Derek Jeter, whom he said worked for that ball, to have the ball back. Now this response has resulted in some fans calling WFAN stating that the Mr. Lopez should have held out and either sold the ball, or demanded money from the Yankees. why not, in a day where teams and athletes make millions and billions of dollars, giving some scraps to Lopez wouldn't break the bank. Why shouldn't a cellphone salesman get paid when MLB and its teams certainly get paid handsomely. Other callers on the other hand said that he did the right thing. Even if not all people do good in the world, we should all DO GOOD, and they applauded this unselfish deed.

Professor X felt the good in people, and always wanted his actions, and the actions of his team to represent that. Christian Lopez believes in the good in baseball, the team and players that he grew up following. While there is much evil in the world, and we are wronged in many ways, it is refreshing to find people who believe in the good and want to do the right thing...just because.