I was listening off and on to a show that my girlfriend was watching in the background while I cleaned up yesterday. It was about a guy who went through considerable efforts to help other Katrina survivors get off their feet. He let them stay with him for free, cut their vehicles out from under trees, etc. Hero, right? Damn straight. The guy went well above and beyond any normal civic duty that he would have to help others. Then the show said, "to all the heroes out there, the survivors of Katrina." It was something crazy and stupid like that. I'm not sure of the exact wording but it was "Katrina survivor = hero."
....
We so badly rape the word "hero" that it's lost most of its value as a label. The conservative and populist parts of America are the main culprits behind that. Virtually every single person who wears a government uniform gets to wear the title. "Our heroes in uniform." Yeah, thanks for showing up and doing your frigging job, while we pay for your GI Bill and give you training. Can you believe this crap? We call people heroes for doing their damn jobs, which just cheapens the word "hero" for those brave souls who risk (and often lose) everything for their fellow man.
I don't mean any disrespect to the uniform and those who do take some small risks for us, but here's the awful truth. We pay them to take on those low-level risks everyday. They signed up, often for enormous benefits. The real heroes are the cop who nearly or does sacrifice his life (not expected of him, by the way) to save an innocent person from a criminal or the soldier who throws himself into harm's way to let his buddies get away. Just patrolling the neighborhood and taking on the random risk of getting shot or carrying a rifle into battle is not genuinely heroic.
That, my friends, is merely what we used to call civic virtue. There was a time when that was expected of all of us, but professional armies and police forces have taken that away from us.
Here's to the real heroes. The cops who buck the code of silence to pursue justice at their own expense. The cops who throw themselves between the public and genuinely dangerous criminals in heated situations (that weren't of their own making, like most SWAT raids) to save innocent lives. To the servicemen who risk and lose their lives to save their comrades and who put their own safety aside to comport themselves in battle in a civilized way that shames their enemies regardless of the outcome.
Really good post, & I couldn't agree more. I've always understood heroes as those who voluntarily go far above & beyond the call of duty. For example, those who ran inside the World Trade Center towers to lend their assistance, when it was obvious that the buildings were horribly damaged & structurally unstable. That's heroic.
Simply surviving a catastrophe doesn't make you a hero. Tough & resourceful, perhaps. Maybe even smart & courageous, or just plain lucky. But a hero? No.
Yeah, the "Cult of the Uniformed Hero" has worried me for a while. It reduces the standard for heroism so that we not not only end up regarding civic virtue as a mere choice, not a duty, but it causes more people to blindly trust those in uniform. The latter is probably worse than the former when things get dicey...
People tend to lose sight of the fact that we pay these people to do these things. Heroism only comes into play when they do things in the line of duty that they are not asked to do, or when they freely sacrifice something significant to do their job that they freely undertook. I wouldn't consider a soldier, in there for the GI Bill, who fights like any other soldier (and maybe gets wounded) to be a hero. I would consider him to just be a probably good man who did his job.
So...
Seemingly by your definition of hero, one must die whilst going above and beyond what an average person feels comfortable doing, albeit, as long as they're not being paid to come to the aid of another - correct?
No, I wouldn't say that they must die to be a hero. I'm saying that there is absolutely nothing heroic about doing the job you're paid for. The examples I used were cops and soldiers who go well above and beyond what is part of their job description, and those things also happen to often get heroic cops and soldiers killed because of the nature of their jobs.
If you need another example, that doesn't involve people in uniform, a hero could be a guy who works another person's shift on top of his own and gives them the wages so that they can stay home with a deathly sick kid. Heroism can in a sense be considered synonymous with a momentary manifestation of "righteousness" which is not just something that is good in one sense, but manifestly above and beyond any ol' normal mitzvah.