What Makes a Hero
What makes a hero? Here's an article which explains, what makes a person a hero.
Where do we draw the line which separates a normal human being from a hero? Unlike what the movies will tell you, one really doesn't need to be in possession of superhuman powers a lacomic book superheroes to be a hero. You don't need to fall from another planet, nor do you need to get bitten by rare icky spiders. Superpowers only embellish the idea, but there is always one inside of us. Well, inside most of us. A true hero is someone who possesses the qualities of one as opposed to the physical attributes of one. He can be a small, portly black man who addresses an assembly about him having a dream for civil rights for the African-American community. He can be the guy who gets cancer, has a testicle removed and yet wins the most prestigious cycling event in the world seven times - consecutively. They are there, amongst us, all we need to do is spot them.
What Makes a Person a Hero?
Selflessness
A hero always puts others before himself. He cares little about his own personal travails which he might have to go through and makes himself available when he is needed. Selflessness is one of the prime qualities which distinguishes him from the rest of us. Whether it is a burning building, or the gun of a criminal, a hero always tries to save the people in danger, all at great personal risk.
Conscience
A hero knows what's right and what's wrong. He or she is able to distinguish between what is correct and what is wrong - something which requires a strong conscience. Often things of moral correctness are neither black nor white and very often tread on some very gray territory. In such a situation, a hero knows who to side with and what is the correct thing to do.
Courage
Picking up from that point about conscience, upholding the morally right option often needs courage. Sometimes a hero needs to jump off the bandwagon, to uphold what is right and here that he must not falter. And to not falter, he needs courage and mental strength.
Intelligence
Apart from his bizarrely expansive family wealth, Batman had little to fall back on apart from his sound intelligence. Tackling the evil forces is often a mental battle and one of the characteristics of a hero is to be have the bottle to fight it. A lot of fights are won with a presence of mind and a sense of good timing. Intelligence often negates the need for brute force and hence is one of the very important answers to the question.
Initiative
So while several of us may be in possession of the above very admirable character traits, very few of us would come forward to display them. A slightly off track quality perhaps, but initiative goes some way in making a good hero. Because say, a man has courage, intelligence, conscience and selflessness, but whiles it away sitting on the couch, is he a hero? Not quite. A hero will ensure that he makes the best of his gifts and with his leadership skills tries to help people with them. They say a man who comes forward in adversity is a true hero, as opposed to someone who simply jumps on the bandwagon.
It is in fact a summation of a few qualities. A hero who stands up for what is right and fights tooth and nail to achieve it. A hero does not lie down in face of injustice. He stands up and achieves the greater good, irrespective of adversities.
By ArjunKulkarni
Published: 6/29/2010
Happiness in this World
Reflections of a Buddhist physician.
by Alex Lickerman, M.D.
What Makes A Hero
Why most of our heroes aren't really heroic
Published on September 19, 2010 by Alex Lickerman, M.D. in Happiness in this World
Photo: nordique
I saw a patient of mine recently whose appearance in my office always makes me smile. He's challenging—not because he's a difficult person (quite the opposite), but because he has so many serious medical problems about which I can do so little. Why, then, does seeing him so consistently lighten my mood? Because it reminds me that for all the terrible things that go on—the abuse, the discrimination, the injustice, the downright nastiness—good still exists in the world. Because, you see, he's a hero.
What makes him a hero isn't the consistent good cheer with which he faces the discomfort his illnesses cause him on a daily basis. What makes him a hero is that fifteen years ago, before he got sick, he donated one of his kidneys to his brother who had AIDS. He told me about it the first day we met when he came to see me, reporting it the same way he did that he lived alone and worked at a large retail chain—in a tone that attached to it no particular significance. Whatever ego boost he may or may not have ever felt from doing it had long since faded. I paused in my history taking, looked up at him from the notes I was making with eyebrows raised as I, at least, thought this remarkable. But in response, he only smiled self-consciously and nodded once to confirm it.
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Around the same time, a professional football player (whose name I can't recall now) was being promoted by the media as a hero, and I remember thinking how strange it was that the entire nation was celebrating him when only a handful of people knew about my patient.
A HERO DEFINED
Not to take away from that football player's accomplishments in any way—I'm a great admirer of excellence in any form—but I found nothing about him even remotely heroic. I wondered if he was ever introduced to my patient if he wouldn't find the label a bit embarrassing himself.
What actually makes a hero? I'd argue it's the willingness to make a personal sacrifice for the benefit of others. If you don't find yourself having to resist a voice inside your head urging you to save yourself instead of whatever action you're contemplating, my heart, at least, will refuse to recognize your actions—however legitimately compassionate or courageous they may be—as heroic. Serving others while simultaneously serving oneself can be noble, certainly, but a special kind of nobility attaches itself to those who serve others at a cost to themselves. That's the nobility that tugs at my heart. That's the the kind of behavior I find heroic.
WHO QUALIFIES?
This definition implies the number of genuine heroes we have is at once smaller and larger than we all think. Smaller, because many of those people held up by the media as heroes, while undoubtedly wonderful in many ways, don't qualify as heroes. Certainly not famous sports figures—even those who quietly provide free game tickets to underprivileged children as Michael Jordan did or volunteer their time and money to charity as numerous pro football players do.
In fact, what sparked my thinking about this topic was a Facebook posting by a friend of mine who wrote, "...on a plane talking to an interesting passenger before take off about his job...will be an interesting flight sitting next to American hero Captain Sullivan..." I found myself reflecting that while Sully does indeed for me represent the epitome excellence, commitment, humility, and grace under pressure, the actions he took in the particular circumstance that made him famous weren't, in my view, heroic. Strictly speaking, he risked losing nothing personal in what he did on that day he and his crew (let's not forget his crew) saved the lives of all the passengers of Flight 1549. He may have been thinking more about his passengers' safety than his own—a characteristic of heroes to be sure—and, in fact, I strongly suspect that had circumstances been different and he'd needed to put himself in personal jeopardy to save those passengers, he would have had done so without hesitation. But those circumstances didn't exist the day he glided that plane safely into the Hudson. He had to make many choices but none that put him in more jeopardy than anyone else. While it seems to me likely that he does, in fact, possess the character of a hero, on that particular day no opportunity presented itself for him to display it. Leadership, courage, decisiveness, and technical expertise—yes. But heroism—no.
And I think he'd agree. Few people consider themselves heroes when doing something they have no choice about doing. This includes, I've discovered, most patients who find themselves facing potentially terminal diseases like cancer. Most such patients, in fact, bristle at the notion that "fighting" their disease makes them heroic. They certainly don't feel like heroes, they tell me. How they feel is tired, discouraged, and sick. They do what they need to do to survive. What's heroic, they want to know, about that? There's no other person whom they hope to save by fighting, no personal sacrifice they're making that another may live. They "fight" to save themselves—a worthy and noble goal certainly, one that requires enormous courage in the face of the painful treatments they must often endure—but not a goal, most of them seem to feel, that in any way deserves to be called heroic. Most of them even refuse to see the keeping of a stiff upper lip in the face of their fear as heroic, even when it's done—as it so often is—in an attempt to ease the burden their loved ones feel in watching them go though their illness.
So how, then, using this definition, are there more heroes around than we think? To find the answer, look at your neighbors and friends. You'll often find, if you bother to ask, that they're making sacrifices for others—sometimes enormous ones—all around you. Single mothers who deny themselves vacations, clothes, and even food to send their children to college. Couples who come to their doctors with forms to be filled out to qualify them to become foster parents. Children who put their careers on hold or even abandon them altogether to care for their sick parents, or to keep them out of nursing homes.
And my patient, who donated a kidney to save his brother. A brother who unfortunately died anyway (this was back when most AIDS patients died no matter what we did—a fact my patient knew himself when he gave him his kidney).
"That's how it goes sometimes," was all he said to me when I asked him about his brother's death during that first visit we had all those years ago.
He'd come to see me, by the way, because his one remaining kidney had started to fail. I subsequently diagnosed him with sarcoidosis and was able to save it, only to flounder at sparing him from further complications of the disease later, complications that have since forced him to go on disability and significantly compromised the quality of his life.
I'm sure he feels bitter about it on some days and rails against his fate on others. He never complains to me about it, though.
He's one of my heroes. Who are some of yours?
Mike Elk
Labor Journalist
Posted: October 15, 2010 01:52 AM
Rescued Chilean Miners Greeted As Heroes -- but They're Also Victims
The 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days have been treated like heroes since their rescue this week. They were invited to the country's presidential palace for a special soccer game. A Greek mining executive offered to pay for them to take an all-expense paid trip to Greece to just relax for a few weeks on Greek beaches. Many other companies have made huge donations to their families.
They are being viewed as heroes, but some disagree with this characterization.
"The miners are not 'heroes,' as they have been called around the world for surviving underground for over two months," NéstorJorquera, president of the Chilean mineworkers union, CONFEMIN, told the Inter Press Service. "They are victims." Many in the international labor movement have complained that news accounts have ignored the poor treatment of workers by the mining company, which intially refused to pay their wages after the miners were trapped underground on Aug. 5.
San Esteban, the company that operates the mine, claimed they had no money to pay the workers who were trapped under the mine. In fact, the company was apparently so broke that it couldn't even pay the costs of the recovery. The government of Chile was forced to pay for a rescue that some say could cost anywhere between $10- $20 million.
As a result, the president of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, vowed to make major changes to the way workers are treated in Chile. "Never again in our country will we permit people to work in conditions so unsafe and inhuman as they worked in the San Jose Mine, and in many other places in our country," he said.
It's important to note that working conditions in Chile are notoriously unsafe. There were more than 191,000 workplace accidents, including 443 deaths, in a country with only a population of 17 million people in 2009, an astronomical rate for such a small country.
President Pinera set up a commission in August to write a report on workplace safety, which is due to be delivered on Nov. 22. The president also announced the creation of a new mining agency to more strictly enforce mining safety laws and increase funding for safety programs.
But Jorquera, president of CONFEMIN, says this is not enough. He called for Chile to agree to the International Labor Organization's (ILO) Convention 176 on Safety and Health in Mines, like most industrialized countries around the world have done.
Whether or not Chile signs on to that convention will make clear how serious the country's leaders are about reforming mine safety laws. It won't be much of a surprise if the media, which often neglects workplace safety issues, quickly moves on after the rescue and ignores mining safety issues in Chile and elsewhere. But let's hope Pinera, and the rest of Chile's leaders in government, act now to ensure we never have to watch another harrowing subterranean story like this unfold.
This article was originally published on Working in These Times where I am a contributing editor.
The parent voice for public school choice
Morehouse student helps launch Peachtree Hope
ATLANTA – Knightdale High School graduate and Morehouse College junior Jon Wall was at the center of the opening of Georgia’s largest ever start-up charter school this fall.
“The real mission was to combat the school to prison pipeline,” said Wall in a telephone interview from Atlanta. Wall is the son of Larry and Tonya Wall of Raleigh.
Wall says half of the 654 students enrolled in DeKalb County’s Peachtree Hope Charter School are black males.
The school uses an international curriculum to challenge students to learn. Spanish starts in Kindergarten, and by 12th grade, students are bilingual, Wall said.
Wall said the school is run by the for-profit company called SABIS, which operates a group of international schools that started in Lebanon for women in 1886. Peachtree Hope is the 10th SABIS school in the country.
A new role
For Wall, who stepped down from being a member of the school’s board of directors this summer to become a member of the management company, the opening of the school was a lesson in education and politics.
“They hired me this summer to be director of communications and my job was everything else including managing publicity,” he said. “I was at court, at county commission meetings, at school board meetings, interviewing for a radio spot, setting up billboards, talking to parents, working water parks on hot afternoons for recruitment. I did something of everything.”
The school had to overcome several obstacles to open this fall. The DeKalb County school board initially rejected the application for Peachtree Hope to become a charter school because it would take about $6,540,000 in funding from the public schools with the 654 kids signed up to attend, Wall said.
But on Jan. 31, 2008, the Georgia state legislature passed a law that allowed charter school applications to bypass local school boards and go directly to a charter school commission for approval.
The constitutionality of that law was challenged in court by 12 county school boards, including DeKalb County. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Wendy Shoob declared the Georgia Charter Schools Commission constitutional.
It was a victory for the founders of Peachtree Hope, but there were more obstacles to overcome.
Also, Wall had to appear before a DeKalb County Commission meeting to convince commissioners to rezone a strip mall to be remodeled for the school.
Wall said the lawsuit slowed down construction because the results could have impacted the school’s income.