If your husband went to war and was seriously injured in combat, I hope someone would slap me if I expressed a problem with him being called a hero. Especially if it was determined his body had (intentionally or not) prevented an innocent civilian from being killed.
I say let this woman have this tiny little good thing and just let it go. I mean, nobody loses anything by labeling her a hero. Either way, whether she intended to or not, a very good thing resulted from her actions. Who cares about the details?
People who care about the details are people who have actually done something heroic in their lives.
But he didn’t. That’s the point. Yet, he’s called a hero, just like the guys who did do something heroic. All he did was stay in about as safe a place as he could be, and put radios in trucks. Go to chow three times a day, and play games on his laptop.
True gallantry? Like tying a rich lady’s ribbon to your hat?
What difference does it make to them? How does this woman being labeled a hero impact other heros or their heroic actions?
I don’t think it impacts other heroes or their heroic actions.
But if we label an accidental saving of a life as heroic, we are watering down the meaning of the word.
As a writer, that’s something I care about.
And that’s my only point.
Oh bullshit. This is one fucking incident. We aren’t talking about some epidemic of falsely labeling people as heros. I just would repeat myself, what does it really harm to let this woman have the hero label?
If she was a personal friend, I’d do that, sure. It would be churlish not to. But here, this poor woman’s feelings are really not at stake, and I think some of us are just more interested in discussing what actually happened rather than some fuzzy-wuzzy feelgood version of what we might like to have happened.
I have no issue at all discussing the true nature of what happened. I don’t think I’ve said otherwise.
Well others have said that too but I just don’t see that. We might be seeing two different videos, or maybe the video you’re seeing starts sooner than the video I’m seeing. I thought maybe it’s an ‘iPad thing’ so I just watched it on my Windows laptop, and it’s the same thing I see on the iPad – the lady in the tan sweater shows up at the last second, never changes direction, and in fact does not grab the kid or push the kid out of the way (or even tries to).
No, the point is that your husband and this lady have nothing in common then, since at a minimum her body may have saved a kid’s life.
There’s no way to tell from the video if she is a hero.
If Jordan makes a statement saying something like, “Thank you all. I just couldn’t let that little boy die, that’s all.” I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that she’s a hero.
But if Jordan makes a statement like, “Well thanks everyone, but I was really just trying to get out of the way.” Then I’ll know she really is a hero.
Excellent.
Agreed.
Actually, her feelings do matter, if you’re empathetic enough to imagine her reading comments about the accident and seeing perfect strangers insist she did nothing of note.
We can speculate all we want about what really happened from a silver of surveillance tape, but I see little point to it when we have no way of confirming anything. Don’t most people take human interest stories at face value unless there’s something majorly implausible or suspicious about them?
And if she says: “Thanks everyone. I can’t remember shit because my head collided that wall and all, but I’m happy no one died that day.” Hero or nah?
Then we’ll never know. Schroedinger’s cat.
Are you looking at the video in the OP’s article? At 12 seconds, you can see her walking down the sidewalk until she disappears off screen. Then suddenly, at 15 secs, you see her moving towards the boy and into the path of the car. It’s obvious she changed direction at some point because she enters the frame two times, not one.
This all aside, at a certain point you have to ask yourself how likely is it that no witnesses saw what happened, leaving the cops with nothing to support the hero narrative except this tiny sliver of footage. I think its highly unlikely. So even if the footage is completely unclear to you, the circumstances of the event (crowded street) makes it unlikely the cops are peddling false stories about this woman.