New York City prides itself on being on the cutting edge, and with police budgets being slashed all over the country, the fact that a band of fairly well-organized vigilante heroes have sprung up in Manhattan really shouldn’t surprise anyone. If you don’t have enough cops, eventually, people are gonna start fighting back on their own.
Tell me, Tea Party members, was the streets of New York being protected by a bunch of twenty-something bouncers and security guards who go by names like Shade and Zero and Short Cut what you had in mind when you decided that smaller government was a great idea?
It sounds like a bad movie, but it’s the truth, and nothing but the truth. A bunch of kids are running around New York, using code names and homegrown martial arts skills to fight a rising tide of crime that they don’t see anyone else stepping up to stop.And these guys aren’t alone, either. They are a part of a wider movement that calls itself the Real Life Super Heroes organization, or RLSH for short. Some of the members of the Real Life Super Heroes organization are spandex-wearing wannabes who are more interested in living out dangerous fantasies than crime fighting. But the New York Initiative, NYI, as Shade and Zero and their cohorts are known, is more likely to show up in bulletproof vests and chainmail breast plates than yellow spanx.
As the HBO documentary Superheroes points out, these are tough Brooklyn boys who have hit the streets to do what they call Extreme Altruism. That’s why they actually prefer to be known as X-Alts, rather than Superheroes.
“You see these guys who wear spandex, and they say they go out to beat people up,” Zero, a former art student turned vigilante who led The Daily Beast‘s Matthew Shaer around with the group for a night. “That’s insane. It is going to get you killed. What we do is more effective. Let me tell you something: If you’re getting in fights all the time, you’re doing it wrong.”
Well, the whole avoiding fighting and stuff bit is good, but are these X-Alts effective as an crime deterrent?
Judging by Shaer’s experience, they’re about as effective as you’d suspect they’d be in the real world, where ordinary guys almost never turn out to be mystically gifted at crime fighting.
Their lives seem a whole lot like the lives of other poor young things in Manhattan. They live in crappy apartments. They work odd jobs to support their dream. A lot of them end up moving back to hometowns across the country eventually when something comes up, or the dream just never comes together. In fact, other than the tattoos, occasional missing limbs, and the other hallmarks of hard lives and poverty that a lot of these kids have, the NYI sounds a lot like how my friends from college have turned out.
Except my code name is Turquoise, which is way cooler than Shade or Zero.
Oops. There goes the secret identity.
