Most of you probably do not recognize this phrase, “I believe in my Creator, my country, my fellow man.” It is part of the Lone Ranger’s moral code. As a young boy, I remember getting up early every morning before school to watch “The Lone Ranger” reruns on Channel 11.
The fictional show, created by Fran Striker and George W. Trendle, first aired on radio in 1933 during the Great Depression. It became a huge hit, spawning a series of books, comic books, a television show, and several films.
The original crime-fighting duo introduced several additions to our language, including “Kemosabe” — Tonto’s affectionate word for the Lone Ranger, “Hi-yo Silver!” — heard in each episode, and finally, the term “lone ranger,” which stands for anyone pursuing a goal on their own.
Clayton Moore, who portrayed the Lone Ranger on television, is the actor my generation associates with the hero. Equally important is the main character’s sidekick, Tonto. Jay Silverheels, a Mohawk from the Six Nations Indian Reserve in Ontario, Canada, was cast in that role on TV.
“If the Lone Ranger accepts the Indian as his closest companion, it’s obvious to the child listener that great men have no racial or religious prejudice,” the creator’s son, Fran Striker Jr., told NPR.
In 2013, Disney produced a movie based on the Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp as Tonto. I had no desire to see that movie. I found it hard to envision Depp as an Indian.
The moral code also reminds the Lone Ranger to avoid violence and to shoot only to disarm. He always uses silver bullets to remember the value of human life. Other guidelines for the show by Striker and Trendle included:
• The Lone Ranger never drank or smoked, and saloon scenes were usually shown as cafes, with waiters and food instead of bartenders and liquor.
• Criminals were never shown in enviable positions of wealth or power and were never successful or glamorous.
In 1996, Jim Lichtman wrote “The Lone Ranger’s Code of the West: An Action-Packed Adventure in Values and Ethics With the Legendary Champion of Justice.” In it, Lichtman lists eight core ethical values he extracted from a 1933 document called “The Lone Ranger’s Standards and Background.”
These ethical values are:
• Loyalty
• Honesty
• Fairness
• Caring
• Respect
• Tolerance
• Duty
• Moral courage
The Lone Ranger taught these values to children — and adults — from 1933 through the 1970s.
These values are being turned upside down as woke ideology enters school systems around America, which center on social justice, intersectionality, and identity politics.
The author of “Left Is Not Woke,” Susan Neiman, writes, “Wokeness demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories. But in the process, it often concludes that all history is criminal.” This is amplified by looking at history by contemporary moral standards.
Jay Sophalkalyan writes in an article on woke culture, “The…problem with woke ideology revolves around its hierarchical moral framework. There, individuals and groups with a greater number of oppressed identities or identities characterized by deeper levels of oppression are heralded as morally superior, whereas those with presumed privileged identities are regarded as morally compromised.”
“I believe,” Striker wrote on behalf of Lone Ranger, “that to have a friend, a man must be one; that all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world; that this government ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’ shall live always.”
When we let God back into our schools and reinforce the ethical values of the Lone Ranger, many societal problems will diminish or disappear.
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NOTE: Trendle and Striker also created another superhero in 1936, the Green Hornet. As Wikipedia describes it, “In the original radio incarnation, Britt Reid is the son of Dan Reid Jr., the nephew of the Lone Ranger, making the Green Hornet the great-nephew of the Ranger.”
