Jacob Bronowski.
Amazing polymath…top tier scientist in more than one area, and a deep understanding of history, politics, and their interplay with human behavior.
All that, coupled with a difficult private life. He was able to see hope and reason when he very well could have fallen into lifetime despair.
Watch his “Ascent of Man” and you will see things differently. Especially the Uncertainty of Knowledge.
I don’t have heroes per se; or maybe they are heroes, but it’s just a sense of admiration either for a deed they have done, or an aspect of their life. I guess no one is perfect, and given enough information, you can pick any one to pieces.
No particular “heroes” come to mind at the moment but I can tell you what a hero is not… Soldiers who are taken prisoners of war after taking a wrong turn, airline pilots who successfully land the plane in the Hudson saving the lives of everyone on the flight, or overpaid actresses who adopt children from third world countries. Jessica Lynch was a pentagon propaganda piece and Sully Sullenberger himself even says he’s not a hero, just a trained pilot doing his job. There are other examples that the media touts as “heroes” that are people just doing their job.
A true hero is someone who has accomplished some extraordinary feat. Above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak. We’re too quick to pin the “hero” label on just about anyone who is in the media.
Every single victim of the Holocaust who, in some way, was able to fight back . . . regardless of whether they survived. Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Otto Schindler, Miep Gies, Sophie Scholl, and so many others, including the Righteous Among the Nations.
That Chinese guy who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square.
Many of our Founding Fathers (and Mothers).
People like “Sully” Sullenberger, who work miracles by doing their jobs superlatively.
Anyone who dedicates his life to creating something good or beautiful.
Great Post. I agree and was just thinking of Anne Frank yesterday.
Heros? Yeah I have some.
Guys like Mike Monsoor, or Ed Freeman are heroes to me.
Why? Because I wonder deep in my heart of hearts that if faced with the same conditions, could I do what they did? Would I measure up, or would I be found wanting? I would like to think I would measure up, but I probably will never know.
To that list, let me add Irena Sendler who helped rescue 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto and who, under torture which broke both her legs and arms, refused to give up names. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler
There are many people I admire, but I save the hero tag for those who risk life and limb for the better good*, whether it’s walking into a burning skyscraper, or smuggling doomed Jews, or going to jail because you refuse to give up your bus seat to a white guy. Kurt Warner rose above expectations to become a Super Bowl winner, but he’s not a hero. Carl Sagan changed my life with his descriptions of our universe, but he’s not a hero.
*My definition of “the better good” is subjective; I have no cites.
My Aunt, Nelson Mandela, Viktor Frankl, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Really my Aunt is the extrapolation-worthy one. She was 13 when I was born. She tolerated my incessant questions when I was in kindergarten, she let me hang out with her cool young adult friends when I was a teenager, and told them to fuck off when they complained. I admired her beauty, her confidence, her popularity and her self-reliance. I absolutely worshiped her and she adored me.
When my life went to shit, she was there. I had a rough, violent childhood with a mentally ill mother, and she was the only one willing to hear my feelings on the matter. At home, I had no rights, but with her, I was an equal. She made sure I had a safe place. She distracted me with movies, Madonna, board games and trips to the Olive Garden. She let me talk when I needed to talk. She subjected herself to years of emotional abuse on my behalf, pretty much doing whatever was necessary in order to remain in my life.
When I was 17 and could no longer tolerate living with my parents, she made good on her promise and welcomed me into her home. She was the only person who stood by me during the hardest year of my life. When my mother revoked my driver’s license, she got up two hours early every morning and drove me to school until I got it back. She was willing to leave her boyfriend of 7 years when he told her either I had to go or he would. Even though I wasn’t the easiest person to live with that year, she stood by me.
She lived every moment of my life beside me and is the only person on the planet who understands exactly where I came from. She knows my strengths and my flaws probably better than I do. And she is the only other person who knows what it’s like to be a sane person living with our psychotic family. I can call her up and talk about anything at any time, no matter how serious or mundane.
And now that we are both married adults, that we are both equals, I see her through a less idealistic lens and a more realistic one, I see her flaws and the ways we are different and she is still my hero. I used to worry that this change in dynamic would change her feelings for me. But two years ago, when my uncle died and I went to comfort my grandmother, she drove 12 hours to help me hold down the fort because even though I didn’t ask her to come, she could hear in my voice that I needed her.
I mean we can wax philosophical all day about what it means to be a hero. To me the answer is rather concrete.
Your response hit close to home. Years ago, I went into business with my father and at that time he was considered quite an expert in his field. One piece of advice her gave me was to avoid my trying to emulate his style or approach in conducting business. He explained that it took him years to develop his expertise and methods, much of which dovetailed to his personality as an individual. “Don’t try to be me.”, he said. “Otherwise, you’ll never find your own business personality to match your comfort zone.”
It took years for me to fully appreciate his advice.
Giuliani…don’t get me started on Giuliani. :mad:
I tend not to see people as heroes in general because heroes always have feet of clay (except for Giuliani, who is clay up to his neck); it’s more character traits and actions that are heroic.
And for me, someone who stands up for the right things even in the face of their own annihilation, even when they have no reason to believe that anyone will ever know of their sacrifice - that’s heroic. A man standing in front of a row of tanks, in China, with no hope of success but doing it anyway because someone has to stand up to tyranny - that’s heroic. A woman refusing to give in to torture to save others - that’s heroic. We are all flawed humans but we are all capable of heroic moments given the right set of circumstances.
These two sentences seem contradictory to me. I agree with the latter.
Of course everyone is flawed. Of course all heroes, without exception, have “feet of clay.”
That’s why the idea that no-one is good enough to be a hero, or conversely that a hero should be worshiped, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what a hero is, IMO.
Heroism is despite human weaknesses and contradictions. Overcoming our intrinsic flaws to accomplish something great and noble is the very essence of it. No hero is ever a perfect being. No perfect being could ever be a hero.
Fair point. It just seems that saying “Person X is a hero” is usually used to mean “We should try to be like Person X” rather than “We should try to act like Person X in similar circumstances”.
I can honestly say that firefighters where I’m from get all of the glory whilst being by far the least heroic of the 3 emergency services. I’ll qualify that before I get accused of trolling:
Paramedics (my personal fave heroes) get called out to any emergency situation where it’s a real life or death emergency and have to ignore a lot of the danger around them in order to concentrate on saving a life or preventing a life altering injury. Their task is incredibly difficult and stressful.
Police get thrown into every type of situation that you can imagine and just have to deal with it. They’re always the first to fires, since there are more cop cars on the street than fire engines, and tend to be the people that run into the burning building and rescue any people inside before the firemen arrive on the scene and spray it from a distance. But it’s not really fires that are their speciality. It’s the fights and chases and riots and anti-terrorism, and just being there when someone’s life has just turned upside down, that makes them heroes in my book.
Firefighters have one job and really only one situation that is at all dangerous, and that’s extinguishing building fires. From talking to many firemen, in London each shift gets maybe 1 or 2 serious fires per year, with the rest of the year being spent playing pool or attending road traffic scenes to cut people out of cars, or putting out small fires. All of the cops and paramedics I know look down on firefighters slightly. hmm… perhaps that’s a bit strong… Perhaps it would be better to say that they are looked on as the slightly weaker member of the emergency services gang.
Since it is illegal for the police in the UK to go on strike, whenever there is a serious call for industrial action, some stations have been known to do “fire brigade policing”, where the police do not patrol but instead just sit in the police station, waiting for an emergency call. This should indicate that the cops do not regard the firefighters as heroes, just the opposite. I guess there is a reason why they’re paid so much less.
My grandmother is 86 years old and wakes up at 5 o’clock every morning to manage a network of soup kitchens which feed over 10,000 impoverished people a day in Vasai, India- which she originally financed by herself with what remained of the family fortune.
She never asks for anything in return, and when she was presented with a gold medal last year by some local worthy she sold it to buy supplies for the kitchens.
Oh, and she tutors local schoolchildren in English and geography for a few hours a day, for free (she was a schoolteacher until she hit 70).
She’s a hero.
Absolutely she is. Wonderful story.
The problem is that, sure, the Nazis wouldn’t have succeeded if everyone simply refused to cooperate. But the Nazis were as well aware of this as you and I, and took steps to prevent it. Resistance was publicly, consistently, and horrifically punished. Historically, dictatorships and corrupt regimes of other sorts tend to fall when they are neither willing to acquiesce to the public’s demands for reform, nor employ the brutality required to stiffle dissent. Ukraine and Georgia are both good recent examples - their colored revolutions succeeded because the governments of those countries were not, at the end of the day, willing to massacre their countrymen to keep power. The PRC rode through Tiannamen Square, on the other hand, because it was willing to crack down hard.
The Nazis were willing to use horrific amounts of violence. They demonstrated that willingness over and over again. And it is a hard thing to convince people to resist without violence when they know it will result in their deaths.
Of course, there’s another very important aspect to this - for much of its rule, Hitler’s government enjoyed considerable popular support. How much the lack of popular nonviolent resistance was due to this, and how much to fear of reprisal, is a hard question - and in truth, I think that until the very end, most Germans probably didn’t dislike the Nazi government enough to even try protest. (Obligatory note: This is not praise of the Nazi regime. Just a note about their political strategy - things like avoiding a wartime economy were explicitly meant to keep the public content.) However, I don’t believe a nonviolent resistance would have been successful even if it had been widespread.
Regarding the comparison of imperial Britain with the Nazis - I wouldn’t try to whitewash British colonial rule. It was often bad, and the Boer War was about as bad as it got. (Kenya’s probably another candidate for worst-of-the-worst). However, I think it’s important to be careful about the use of language here - as horrible as British concentration camps were, they were not death camps. Yes, people died - many of them, in horrible conditions, in ways that could have been avoided had the Brits been even a little less bloody-mindedly indifferent. And yes, the Brits killed many innocent people - they committed war crimes.
But - the Brits, for all the evil and folly of the Boer War, were not genocidal. “Kill every last Boer” wasn’t even remotely on their agenda. There are degrees of evil - and the Brits weren’t even close to the Nazis.
No, of course not. They wouldn’t have to let it get that far. They’d simply rape, torture, and kill whatever women they could get their hands on until the remainder had been convinced that, as horrible as life under the Taliban is, it beats the risks of resistance. It worked for the Taliban before 2001, sadly - why wouldn’t it work now?
Thank you. I may disagree with you in some regards, but I have tremendous respect for anyone who does use non-violent resistance to fight tyrants. So, thank you for doing that.
I’m sure we all do.
But insisting that this is the only legitimate way of resistance, in all circumstances, is making the perfect the enemy of the good, and condemns many innocents to greater suffering along the way.
Mandela never renounced violence, yet managed to strike one of the great blows of liberation in modern times and avoid a war which for years many observers assumed was inevitable.
Here he is speaking of one of his heroes.