Here’s Why Everybody’s Not a Hero
Being a hero comes at a price, which is way too exorbitant for most of us to rationalize
“ Edward Snowden Is Almost Broke ”, Time Magazine announced the other day, citing a UPI report. Well, there we go again; being a hero comes at a price.
Snowden has paid dearly enough already: he has been stranded in an airport lounge for days, he remains a fugitive in exile, he has been called a crook and a traitor — you would imagine he has paid the price of his defiant act.
You would be wrong. He has yet to pay — and going broke is but a small down payment on the debt some are known to have paid with their lives.
We need not take a tour of history to see how it is. News headlines demonstrate the point adequately enough. We receive daily reminders of how Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning spends her time in jail; how Julian Assange remains holed up in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy building; how Malala Yousufzai and her family cannot return to Pakistan for fear of their lives; and how Aaron Swartz was harassed into taking his own life.
You find at least some of these, to put it mildly, controversial, right? In fact you might believe some of these are villains rather than heroes. Well, ostracism is part of the price a hero has to pay. Let us not lose sight of the fact that doing the right thing under favorable circumstances is not heroism — it is mundane; heroism is doing the right thing in the face of every adversity, including being painted as a villain.
Still, if you must have an uncontroversial set of present day heroes, consider how Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years behind bars for standing up against apartheid; how Aung San Suu Kyi remained under house arrest for fifteen of the twenty-one years between 1989 and 2000 for no bigger sin than advocating democracy to the face of a military dictatorship; and how Benazir Bhutto laid down her life for challenging forces of extremism.
The thing is, the price tag our world is putting on heroism is way too exorbitant for the great majority of us to rationalize. Only a microscopic minority can muster the courage to bite the bullet.
Could we possibly find ways to lower this price? One way could be for many more of us to act like those we consider heroes — to be the change we wish to see in the world. This should not be difficult — for don’t we all want to be heroes?
But there is abundance of evidence suggesting that while we all want to be heroes, we have no taste for interrogations and indictments, incarceration and exile, bullets and batons, etc. — the standard fare of heroes.
In short, we want to be heroes without going through the mill. This is why everybody is not a hero, and this why heroism will continue to be expensive. Heroes will continue be few and far between in the foreseeable future.
