The Death of Heroes

It seems that the last few years of my life have been spent lamenting the death of one hero after another.  To be fair, most of these "deaths" are not physical meet your maker type deaths in the true sense of the word but rather moral or ethical failings that bring the person down from their lofty pedestal.  It seems our heroes are not living up to their hero stature and are more and more regularly falling from grace to rejoin us common men.

The first such hero that comes to mind is one of my boyhood favorite sports figures, Roger Clemens.  Clemens has been accused of cheating on baseball by using performance enhancing drugs ("PEDs"), cheating on his wife with a teenage country singer, and cheating on his oath by lying to Congress.  To my knowledge, none of these accusations have been conclusively proven to date, but yet they create doubts in my mind about the integrity and honesty of this man who I so admired.  As a lawyer I am compelled to say in our nation we are innocent until proven guilty and we should withhold judgment until actual proof is put forward and judgment is rendered, but as a mere mortal myself, I can't help but have my doubts.

The list could go on and on, from the Lance Armstrong doping allegations to the most recent scandal to rock the sports world, how Penn State football botched handling the Jerry Sandusky allegations, our heroes are dropping like flies.  Even those heroes who are dead and gone cannot escape the bring down of modern journalism and media.  Just this past year in a new biography of the late Walter Payton, Sweetness as he was known, was turned sour by nasty allegations of extramarital affairs, emotional abuse towards his wife, and addictions to painkillers and laughing gas.

I sometimes think that perhaps we were better off as a society in the days when we didn't know so much.  When Mickey Mantle was famous few people knew of his penchant for late night gallivanting and being a booze-hound.  This may be a ostrich with its head in the sand mentality, but perhaps there is some truth to the adage what you don't know can't hurt you.  I wonder if we didn't know the sordid details of every celebrity's dirty laundry if we would feel better about the country we live in.  Would our sense of the moral and ethical state of our society be different if we didn't see so much scandal?    

As I think of these scandals and others involving the political candidates, movie stars, and musicians who we as a society elevate to hero status I cannot help but think about what a real hero is and who we should really be worshiping.  

The second part of that question is easy; we should worship God the father and Jesus our savior.  As the good book instructs, there shall be no other gods before Me.  Maybe if we placed more of our focus on God and our relationship with Him while attempting to live a just and moral life ourselves we would be less focused on placing our hope and faith in worldly heroes who so often fail us. 

The first part of the question is more complex.  What makes someone a hero?  A true hero is someone who lives a right, decent, and morally just life.  A true here is a person who serves others and leads with strength and compassion.  A true hero is someone who respects others and themselves while being humble and gracious.  A true hero suffers hardship and indignity with grace and nobility.  A true hero not only rises to the occasion when required, but also shows up everyday.  A true hero gets up after being knocked down and takes responsibility for their actions.

When looking at the road ahead I fear that in our society today we have too few people struggling to be the everyday heroes the nation needs to survive.  In today's me first, self-centered, entitlement society we have too few people trying to do what is right and too many people trying to get theirs.  If more of us do not step up to become true everyday heroes, we could witness the death of our heroic American society.