Batkid Was Beautiful — Let's Keep It Going

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By Chris Taylor2013-11-16 01:35:29 UTC

Earlier this week, the folks at the Make-a-Wish Foundation's San Francisco branch called me about a crazy scheme they were cooking up for a boy named Miles, who has leukemia. Because he loved Batman, they were going to drive him around the city in a borrowed Lamborghini with Batman decals, and had arranged some set pieces, such as a damsel in distress in a cable car, for Miles to participate in.

At that point, some 7,000 strangers had signed up on the Make-a-Wish website to provide the necessary flash mobs — a crowd in Union Square to alert Miles to the dastardly Penguin's schemes, and another outside City Hall to thank him for saving 'Gotham.' The organizers figured they would be lucky if half those people showed up.

If you've been on the Internet at all Friday, you know what happened next. Batkid, as Miles was known, became a global meme. The #SFBatkid hashtag was placed on more than 200,000 tweets. Politicians from the President on down jumped on the Batkid bandwagon. Tweets came in from 117 countries. Hearts were warmed around the globe by the sight of this boy striding purposefully towards evildoers in a killer Batkid costume. (His little brother got to play Robin.)

In San Francisco itself, the scene was insane. Those RSVPs had reached 15,000 by Friday, and I'm willing to bet more than that number showed up. We don't have any official estimates on crowd size, but in every Batkid set-piece location I visited, people were standing four or five deep on the sidewalk, holding handmade signs, wearing bat-masks, cheering for Batkid. City Hall was draped in Batkid banners. There hasn't been a turnout this big since the Giants won the World Series; maybe not even then.

It was an astonishing outpouring of emotion, both in the city and on social media. Most everyone cried, some more than once. You got the sense that the story was about more than just doing a good deed for a boy who's been through hell; it was, like many charitable encounters, about redeeming much of what is rotten within our adult selves. "Save us, Batkid!" read the handmade signs. Save us he did.

The overwhelming reaction I had, leaving the sea of supporters in Civic Center Plaza, was this: we have to keep this going. We have to find the essence of what united us today — that ephemeral goodwill — and use it for good. Social media has sometimes been derided for what sociologists call its "weak ties;" Batkid proved that those weak ties can become very strong, very fast, if only we have something universally admirable to rally around, something in the real world.

The other element of Batkid that I think charitable organizations could learn from is the whimsicality of it. We can all identify with a five year-old's dream of becoming a superhero. We recall what we lost when we grew up, that sense of pure playfulness, and we wonder if it's okay to still dream about it. An event like this becomes an acceptable form of role-playing, a flash mob that everyone is in on.

San Francisco has always done this particularly well. If you assign yourself an outlandish role, people here tend to help you become it — witness the rise here of the 19th century eccentric Emperor Norton, who declared himself ruler of the U.S., and was widely treated as such.

But at the risk of offending my adopted city, I don't think there's anything special about San Francisco that this kind of thing has to happen here. These are human traits and human needs; all humans feel joy when they help others achieve dreams. So if your heart was warmed by Batkid, think about the Batkids, young and old, in your community, in your social media spheres. What dreams can you help fulfill today?