Current Reading
I just started reading Huntington's The Third Wave. I wandered to the pond near where I live and sat there on a bench overlooking the water, and found myself actually facing two very young women who were sunbathing right in front of me. It took me only a few minutes to realize that I was never going to read a single word in that situation, so I wandered off to a spot near the water that didn't have the same "view" that I had a few moments before. Interesting book so far, although I'm only about 50 pages into it.

Heroes
The point of this came from a letter to an editor in the New York Times today, but I'm starting to notice it as well. We have this really bad habit of making "heroes" out of people who really aren't heroes. Right now, there's an interview going on on CNN about the Van Dam kid that was murdered, and the female reporter (with a really bad blond hair day) started by calling the two parents of the dead child "heroes." Now, I know that the death of a kid is tragic, and I really feel for the parents on this, but honestly, they aren't heroes. They haven't done anything to cause others to want to emulate them. All they did was suffer through a tragedy.

This complex of hero worship seems to have gotten kind of strange lately. National news agencies automatically made the comment that the people who died in the World Trade Center were "heroes." I didn't make that connection. The firefighters, the police, the fated passengers of the airliner that crashed due to their actions, and people who went above and beyond the call of their own safety were heroes. Jessica Lynch was not a hero. She was a soldier who got captured when her unit wandered to the wrong place. If the stories have any validity to them (which I questioned even as I first heard them), the troops that went to rescue her would be considered heroes, but possibly the one hero during this time was the Iraqi lawyer who went out of his way to help US troops find her while his own life was threatened by US troops who were trigger-happy when he tried to help them out.

There's a Greek tragedy (wish I could remember the title and author, but I just remember the line) that has the following dialogue (very close to its actual words, although it's been a very long time since I read it).

First soldier: Pity the nation that has no heroes.
Second soldier: No, pity the nation that needs heroes.

I think we try too hard to make heroes out of common people who are not really heroes. I don't think that many young people have role models anymore. I could be wrong on this, but I don't see much incentive for the youth of today to want to grow up to be the next Clinton, Bush, Sammy Sosa or Jessica Lynch. Even our great heroes of a few decades ago, the Luke Skywalkers and such, are tainted when we look at them in the media of today. The hero of the new Star Wars movies is Anakin Skywalker, and if someone glorifies that character as a hero, that young person is glorifying the eventual Darth Vader. Not exactly a lot to aspire to, almost as if Hollywood (or Lucas) is telling us that we should strive to be the hero we can, but we need to understand eventually we're going to turn against our own people and enslave everyone around us because even the good people are all bad, or something like that.

Where's Bill the Cat when we need a true hero?

Stumble It!