As far as mission statements go, Spider-Man has one of the best. I mean, who can forget the immortal words, “When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen? They happen because of you.” Or was that, “Your father lived by a philosophy, a principle, really. He believed that if you could do good things for other people, you had a moral obligation to do those things”? That’s the one.

In all seriousness, trying to rephrase one of the most iconic lines of all literature is no easy task. One might say there is great power in that phrase, and rewording it so that it doesn’t sound trite and clichéd is itself a great responsibility. For my part, I felt that the latest take felt the most natural. It wasn’t trying to hard too articulate it precisely. It wasn’t distilled into a perfect form, that ideal thing that never really comes to mind when we need it. It was a thought–an abstract–trying to claw its way through the imperfection of this world to show us a glimpse of truth.

So too are the guiding philosophies of our nation. Many of them have been distilled into eloquent, endlessly quotable 100 proof shots of liberty. We know them by heart, even if we don’t always get the words just right. We, the individuals who carry that baton of freedom from generation to generation, have tried to uphold those self evident truths, to live up to the examples set by the founding fathers.

But it gets exhausting sometimes, trying keep track of local politics, state politics, national politics, let alone global. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, to just want to live our lives without constant vigilance. We begin to narrow our focus to just one level, or worse, to tune out government altogether. So when a global pandemic hit, it’s no wonder that our instincts failed us. We may have doubted the severity of the crisis, or questioned the lockdown, but ultimately our inexperience with that level of threat and reservations about our adequacy lead us to defer to the medical and civil authorities.

Spider-Man, too, has let his Spidey-Sense go on occasion. In last year’s Far From Home, he was more concerned with living a normal life than keeping his guard up. When an interdimensional threat arose, he was all too eager to pass the buck to others. Despite his own great power, and E.D.I.T.H., the nifty drone army bequeathed to him by the late Tony Stark, he felt the best way to honor these great responsibilities was to entrust them to the only person who seemed to have any solution to the threat: Mysterio.

Turns out, the very person he turned over his weaponized inheritance to was behind the whole thing. The foes he vanquished were nothing more than projections he and his conspirators had conjured for the express purpose of preying upon Peter’s insecurities. Mysterio saw a system–powerful beyond belief and dangerous in the wrong hands–entrusted to an inexperienced youth, decided he would be a better steward of it, and manipulated the web crawler into willingly relinquishing it.

We, too, are the heirs of a tremendously powerful system. Our form of government–its ideals and institutions–have enabled us to become arguably the most powerful and prosperous society the world has ever known. We, too, have been targeted for our perceived inability to effectively take responsibility for that system. Our elected officials believe that citizens can’t be trusted with freedom when there’s a nasty bug going around. We, too, have willingly parted with that power. We sat by while that freedom was taken from us, or worse, we continue to willingly advocate its limitation.

We, as a nation, are sitting in that bar. The villains responsible for stoking our fears are feigning reluctance as they take control of our inheritance.

Now, I have no intention of going down the rabbit hole on the virus’ origin. For one thing, that subject is very much a moving target at this point. For another, it is irrelevant to the point I’m trying to make. Whether, like Mysterio, our government or another actively played a part in the creation of the threat or not, our government has no doubt projected cataclysmic stakes if we don’t heed its warnings, and it has certainly benefited from the aid of a cadre of allies in making those projections as believable as possible.

Likewise, I don’t intend to discount the lethality of Covid-19. It is indeed a deadly disease. The real damage caused by Mysterio’s drones, however, didn’t make the projections any more real. No matter how much destruction they caused, and no matter how many people ultimately succumb to Covid-19, it’s safe to say that both earth shattering worst case scenarios were essentially fiction.

One day we will have a pretty good handle on how this virus started and how many lives it has taken. That will be the time to discuss culpability. Chasing our tails, bickering about who or what is responsible, will only distract from the question at hand: how do we get our system back from those who have deceived us?

Some are protesting in the streets. For all the effort such demonstrations take, they amount to asking Mysterio politely for the E.D.I.T.H. glasses back. Those who would limit our freedoms have us just where they want us, where they’ve expended tremendous patience and political capital to get us. They may placate us by lifting restrictions sooner than intended, but a return to the status quo of February 2020 would leave in place whatever laws or rulings that either explicitly allowed the lockdowns or those that were so vaguely worded as to be interpreted as allowing them. Without targeting such statutes or interpretations for repeal or appeal, we leave the system in their control.

So here we are, with the Elementals apparently defeated, the curve ostensibly flattened, and our Spidey-Sense going off like crazy. We have have handed our system over to villains who believe us to be too weak, too naive, too selfish to appropriately wield it.

The truth is, we have been weak. We have continued to tolerate, to advocate, the lesser of two evils rather than face the consequences of voting our conscience.

We have been naive. We have believed generation after generation of politicians who promised to protect our freedoms while contributing to their systematic dismantling.

We have been selfish. We have believed that defense of liberty can be compartmentalized to a vote, a representative, or any army; that we can live our lives free of that continual struggle.

With great power comes great responsibility. We have been endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. The founders of our nation secured these rights, further endowing us with a system of unmatched potential. They saw something in the American people, a great power that told them we could be trusted with that potential, that we could keep it. But this generation did not build this system. We don’t understand it. We haven’t earned it. We have come to rely too much on the endowments of our forefathers and not enough on those of our Creator.

When Peter Parker realized his mistake, he also realized it was time to stop trying to be the next Iron Man; that it was time to start being his own Spider-Man. He crafted his own suit and gadgets. He remembered his responsibility, and with it returned his instincts. He confronted his deciever and retook the power he had abdicated.

It’s time for us to do the same. Let’s pray we can do so without a fight.