« ah, Spring. | Home | kind of not heroic »
we can be heeeeeeewooooooes
By briantologist | June 2, 2009
So the theme for NaBloPoMo this month is “Heroes.” Not the godawful show, but the broader concept. My feelings on the former are honestly more clear-cut than those on the latter; the concept of heroism, for example, did not start sucking goat balls two episodes into the second season.
Here’s the part where I lazily and rhetorically ask, “What makes a hero?” I just now spent nearly eight minutes thinking about this, and from this I can assure you that this is, indeed, a tangled matter. For me, anyway. For starters, I think it’s not just my inner 15-year-old that thinks everything’s bullshit: I really do think there’s an empirically valid case to be made against the seventh-graders in charge of our national media outlets, and the idea of heroism they’re pushing. But it’s not an obvious one.
Take, for example, one Chesley Sullenberger, who — did anyone else hear about this? — performed a brilliant high-stress crash landing of a passenger airliner in the Hudson River a few months back. The aforementioned seventh-graders shit their pants, their neighbors’ pants, and the pants of their immediate families over this one, knowing, of course, that not only did they have occasion to play the same three loops of crash footage for seventeen consecutive days, but they had an HONEST-TO-CRAP MOTHERFUCKEN HERO BITCHES U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! to repeat the same fourteen lines of horse shit about for the next month.
I am not saying he (and his First Officer, about whom you don’t hear nearly as much, despite his also being in the very same cockpit and probably helping out with a thing or two during this whole process) wasn’t mind-bogglingly cool-headed, smart, and crafty during that whole episode. Beyond any doubt, he was. But here’s the thing or six: Technically it’s his job to do stuff like he did. (From what I can recall, he was saying the same thing to anyone who’d listen during the seventy-year media erection that followed the crash.) In some part of his mind — probably a part that wasn’t buried too deep, considering how automatically he called up the knowledge he needed to save the lives of everyone aboard — he knew, when he woke up that morning and got on that plane, that there was a chance something like that would happen, and that it’d be up to him to try and fix it. Just like firefighters know, every time they slide down that pole, that there’s a chance they’ll run into a life-or-death situation they’ll have a quarter-second to analyze and act on. Same goes for cops, soldiers, ER doctors, and those guys who rent Segways downtown.
This absolutely does not mean these people are anything but deeply admirable, insanely brave, and worthy of anything but our heartfelt respect and gratitude. Duh. The thing that keeps ocurring to me, though, is that when faced with a crisis situation that has to get dealt with in less than a second, these people have literally years of training backing up their instincts. Forming their instincts, even, if the training has taken properly. They’re heading into the situation prepared, is what I’m getting at here, and frankly, if you’re giving the proper respect due to their training and aptitudes, you’ve really got to admit that their chances of coming out okay are pretty great.
I mention all this because it comes in some contrast with the Little Rock Nine: A bunch of school kids who faced raging racist mobs and National Guard troops carrying out the orders of a raging racist governor, all in the name of attending a high school wherein they were spit on, derided, and in at least one case attacked with acid by some additional high school-age raging racists.
You could argue, and have a bit of a point, that growing up black in a racist redneck Hell like 1950s Arkansas is quite a bit of training for facing the completely undeserved shit storm the Little Rock Nine were faced with. There’s no way you reach age 13 in a climate like that without knowing what sorts of miserable shits are out there itching to try and make things awful for you, and the extents to which they’ll go to enforce their mindless agenda. Even acknowledging this, though, it’s impossible to deny the sheer terror these kids had to face when they set survival instincts aside and did what they knew was right. It’s also impossible to ignore the difference between people who’ve trained for a dangerous professional career and a bunch of kids who seriously shouldn’t have to be dealing with this shit.
Again, I’m not saying that people who risk their lives every day aren’t heroic — they are, and there’s no sense denying it. What I am saying is that there’s an unimpeachable heroism in actions taken by the powerless in the face of an overhwelming and terrifying power. But when I think about those kids trying to go to school, and then think of someone with years of training and experience setting out to do what he or she’s been trained to do, I can’t help but see the scales of heroism tip ever so slightly to one side.
Topics: NaBloPoMo, Thinkin'. | 2 Comments »
June 4th, 2009 at 10:44 pm
And this is why my husband always gets weirded out when people come up to him and effusively thank him for his service. He is simply doing his job, the job he was trained for, like any other guy out there. He’s not saving people’s lives or visiting wounded Iraqi kids in hospitals or taking down bad guys at a click and a half. I am proud of him for the sacrifices he does make (like not being around for much of our older daughter’s life), and I love the fact that he is a sailor. But he isn’t a Hero in the true meaning of the word. Not like those kids in Arkansas.
June 5th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
A fireman who runs into a burning building to save someone is doing his job.
A guy walking his dog sees a burning building and runs inside to save someone is a hero.
The word “hero” gets thrown around way too often these days.