Where are the heroes and heroines of our lives? Who are the heroes and heroines of our lives, and what is it that makes us claim them for that role?
I first began thinking about these and related questions about a year ago, when I read a sort of comparative survey on heroes and role models in the Utne Reader. The survey results were drawn from a book called, What Price Fame? , which compiled the answers to survey questions asked of teenagers in 1898 and in 1986. In 1898, the question asked was: "What person of whom you have ever heard or read would you most like to resemble?" 78% chose politicians, moral leaders and generals, with the top places going to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton and Anne Sullivan. In 1986 the question was a little different but presumably meant to elicit the same information. Teens were asked, "Who do you most admire?", and the top ten people listed were Bill Cosby, Sylvester Stallone, Eddie Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Molly Ringwald, Chuck Norris, Clint Eastwood, Rob Lowe, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Don Johnson — all of them celebrities, and the one politician in the lot was a President who had formerly been an actor.
Now, I realize that the contrast here does not necessarily have to be read in dire terms. 1898 had none of the celebrity-making vehicles that so dominate our culture today, especially visual media like television and movies. Kids as well as adults see the faces of celebrity all the time, and the glamour and glitz surrounding them can be very seductive. It's also natural for teenagers to identify with some icon of popular culture, someone who seems closer to hand and more relevant to real life than a person who lived long ago and whose name appears only during the dreary hours of a history class.
But the answers in 1986 are nevertheless enough to give one pause. The question asked was not, 'Who's music do you like the best?' or even 'Whose lifestyle would you most like to adopt?' It was, 'Who do you most admire?', and the people named in answer had to do, not with heroic behavior or accomplishment, not with helping the world or overcoming hardship, but simply with fame. I presume that if the same question were asked of teenagers today, fifteen years later, the names on the list would be different but their roles probably would not be. That is, the top ten would still likely be celebrities of film, TV and music. Some of them may well have admirable personal qualities. But what put them on the list of the top ten was fame, money and celebrity status.
Our children are not the only ones who confuse celebrities and heroes. It isn't our kids, after all, but the culture around them that presents money and fame as the high desirables, and offers very little focus on the collective life and what kinds of behavior serve the good of the whole. When celebrity is the focus our attention is drawn to lifestyle and gossip rather than the profound human qualities that we once thought of as being the stuff of heroism: bravery, perseverance, honesty, self-sacrifice, clarity of vision, trustworthiness.
About a year ago I saw a funny, creative film some of you may also have seen, called Being John Malkovich. Its main characters are all people dissatisfied with their lives on multiple levels. One of them accidentally discovers a trapdoor hidden within an office cubicle, and when he goes into the tunnel it reveals he is suddenly whisked into the brain of the actor John Malkovich. In a play on the well-known dictum that everyone will enjoy fifteen minutes of fame, he spends fifteen minutes in Malkovich's brain before being unceremoniously dumped on the New Jersey Turnpike.
He and the ambitious lead woman in the film develop a lucrative business, selling tickets to people to spend their fifteen minutes inside a celebrity's brain. The people line up by the score to do this despite the fact that most of the time someone's in his head, John Malkovich is simply eating his toast, reading the Wall Street Journal, belching, scratching and talking to himself. Being, in other words, a profoundly ordinary person just like the profoundly ordinary people lining up for their fifteen minutes of 'being' John Malkovich.
The premise sounds very silly if you haven't seen the film, and you just have to take my word for it that it's worth renting and watching. And what it points to, with wry humor, is this tendency among us to crave the celebrity: to be near one, to see one, to be seen by one, no matter who he or she may really be as a person.
What's the difference between a hero or heroine and a celebrity? In his book The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell wrote, "A celebrity may well live only for the self and still qualify as a celebrity. A hero's ultimate goal must be the wisdom and power to serve others." Of course it's possible for heroes to also become celebrities after a fashion — to at least become famous. Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Albert Schweitzer come to mind, and others from more distant times. Some of them were heroes to each other, as Gandhi was to Martin Luther King.
But when a hero becomes famous, so that he or she is held up for widespread admiration and even hero-worship, there are some dangers. For one thing, we sooner or later discover that our heroes and heroines have feet of clay, just like the rest of us. Whether it's in sexual peccadilloes or temper tantrums, political compromise or some financial scandal, our heroes and heroines generally don't turn out to be saints, and when they fall they fall hard.
Even when we're not aware of their human failings, or when those failings seem minor compared to the goodness of the life they've led, famous heroes leave us at risk of standing so far below the pedestal that our lives don't seem to intersect with theirs. Heroes can't do us much good unless we see some way to emulate them, to incorporate some of what they grew to be into our own growth and maturity. We can admire a Mother Teresa. We can be grateful that such a woman gave of herself so profoundly to people involved in some of the worst suffering imaginable. But it's hard to find the intersections of our lives with hers, or know how to take her example into ourselves.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote an article in The Nation twenty years ago in which he shed some light on this dilemma and pointed to an answer. He wrote, "I apologize for all the stories and plays that have taught young people that there are stars and bit-part players, and that the stars are all that matter. Look! There is the Emperor Napoleon crossing a battlefield after a victory — astride his dapple-gray. What are all those heaps of rags on the ground? Those are bit-part players, dying or dead...It is shockingly clear to me that people have so mingled stories and real life in their minds that they imagine in real life there are stars on the one hand and, on the other hand, people who do not matter....Let us tell them why some characters are more important than others in art, and that this has nothing to do with life itself. Life has no unimportant characters."
"Life has no unimportant characters". That statement becomes more believable if we allow ourselves to think less in terms of heroes as stars or celebrities, and more in terms of heroism itself. For every man or woman who became famous because of their heroic decisions or the ways they inspired others, there have been many thousands of unknown men and women who brought the hero's struggle to fruition.
Nelson Mandela is a hero of mine, since I became an activist in college around the issue of U.S. investments shoring up apartheid in South Africa. He would have been a source of strength and inspiration even had he died a martyr during the twenty-eight years he spent in prison.
But we know that apartheid was ultimately defeated because courageous leaders like Mandela were linked with tens of thousands of men and women whose names and faces we'll never know. Many of them, heroically, gave their lives in trying to bring about the changes in which they believed. Gandhi's struggle for Indian independence rested on the hundreds of thousands of people with the courage and discipline to engage in nonviolent resistance with him, and again, their faces and names are unknown to us. All of these people are heroes and heroines, despite the fact that we will never hear their names spoken. They are heroes not by virtue of celebrity status or fame but because they called forth within themselves heroic qualities and heroic behaviors.
Even the people whose names and faces we do know, the ones who became famous and admired, began their walk down that path with no inkling of where it would lead. We look back on Rosa Parks as one of the sparks that ignited the civil rights movement, but on the day in 1955 that she refused to move from her seat on the bus, she had no way to read the future. She 'had no assurance that the theories [she'd studied] would work, that the strategy would succeed, nor that her friends would be there with her in the aftermath of that decision. It was a lonely choice made in isolation,' but it was a choice born of the common heroism available to all of us. [Parker Palmer]
I think about the recent uproar surrounding Bob Kerry, when it became public that thirty years ago in Vietnam he was captain of a platoon that massacred civilians in the hamlet of Thanh Phong. The sorry history of that war and all the atrocities committed lie very raw near the surface of our collective memory, and despite the seriousness of the charges, there seems to be little stomach for a true investigation. Kerry has been regarded as something of a war hero because of losing his leg in combat. Is he now a villain? Is it possible to be both hero and villain?
Bob Kerry's story raised painful and inevitable comparisons to My Lai, and most of us who lived through the years of the war will remember forever the name of Lt. William Calley tied to that massacre. It isn't fair to declare that John Kerry is a William Calley. But it is also unfair to dismiss barbaric behavior as something in which everyone becomes embroiled in the heat of war. We know the name of William Calley, but how many of us remember, or ever knew, the names of Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta? These were the three soldiers whose helicopter spotted the massacre underway in My Lai. Thompson not only brought down his helicopter between the remaining civilians and his fellow soldiers, he drew his own gun to protect the ones left and then flew them out. I would wish that when we remember all the damage of Vietnam, we might remember as well the ones who, like these three, held on to their humanity enough to behave like true heroes.
This is what I want to hold to in claiming my heroes and heroines. It's what I hope my children will internalize. Heroism is composed of heroic behavior, and heroic behavior can be elicited in anyone, at any time — even in someone who has also been a villain. We will probably hold on to some heroic figures from the list of the famous, despite revelations of their feet of clay. I don't think I will ever let go of Ghandi or Mandela. We don't need to hold such people on a pedestal or believe them to be saints. We need only remember that they walked through their lives, as each one of us do, one day at a time. One day at a time they made enough right choices, good choices, heroic choices, that they glimmer out there for all of us long after their deaths and show us a little more light for our own lives than we might otherwise know.
But even more important for me are those nearer at hand, those who never get placed on a pedestal and whose names may never be spoken in a wide or public circle, but who learned to draw out of themselves the elements of true heroism. I think about Fernando Ramirez, the Columbian trade unionist who recently spoke here as part of an effort to publicize the terror underway in Columbia. Trade union members are regularly targeted for assassination, and he took a tremendous additional risk in becoming vocal and public with his story.
After he had spoken here I asked him whether or not he wasn't fearful about his return, knowing he'd made himself more of a target by what he had said. He nodded and then shrugged and said, "You know, there's always danger. But if we don't raise our voices bravely despite that danger, we might as well already be dead."
I think about my friend Barbara Collier, who works among the homeless in San Francisco. That's one of the populations still being ravaged by AIDS, and Barbara's response was to add hospice care to the many services provided through the soup kitchen she helps run. She is also one of the only people I know who provides memorial services for the homeless when they die, giving them the comfort of that knowledge before their deaths and giving their comrades on the street a way to grieve, and to name aloud the one our society leaves nameless and unknown. She has been doing this work every day for more than twenty years.
I think about our own Mercedes Drummonds who, as a mother raising four daughters on welfare nevertheless found ways to stretch herself to help other families in the Waverly Townhouses. She has done this not once but year after year, extending herself into the roles of surrogate parent, go-between with bureaucracies, advocate for justice, organizer and comforter.
These people and others like them salt our communities with heroism. They teach us that beyond the role models we hold to as our public heroes are the heroic behaviors within ordinary lives, when a person becomes willing to step out of the small circle of personal interest. They become heroes not because of one courageous action but because they live each day making the small choices that add up to a wider good. This heroism stands as a provocative invitation to all of us because these day by day choices are ones that face us as well. Our lives are brief and fragile. Facing that fact, there is comfort in knowing that some glimmer of light continues after our lives have ended, because the integrity and courage we've brought to our choices have made us, at least in someone's eyes, into a hero.
AMEN.