What is a hero? Someone successful? Someone who did something no one else did? Someone who risked his/her life?
We link much of our heroism to figures without consideration of what they represent. For example, consider the coed who ran to a burning car to try and unpin the individual trapped beneath before the inevitable explosion. She is heroic to the upmost degree; however, I do not condone her life risking behavior and do not include such actions in my repertoire.
It seems that a hero is someone who was in the right place at the right time, acted without conscious calculation of risk, and then was able to pull off the action they were trying to complete. What I am attempting to convey is there is a differentiation between who we consider our heroes and those we consider heroic.
When asked “who is your hero?” many will answer with a pathetically cliché list of Abraham Lincoln, Mom, Dad, Bill Gates, Lebron James, Barrack Obama, the Pope, or the like. I am not saying these people are not heroes; yet, when we ask the question “who acts heroically?” individuals populate a different list: the police officer, the soldier, the firefighter, the EMT, or the individual who ran into the house to save the kid trapped on the top floor. Therefore, it is through this observation that I make the claim: we fail to adequately align who is heroic and who we qualify as our personal heroes.
Let me provide another personal example. I finished watching the movie “Neerja” about Neerja Bhanot. Neerja was the head purser on Pan Am Flight 73, which was hijacked by terrorists while on the tarmac at Pakistan’s Karachi Airport in the 1980s. She worked to provide protection to the passengers whom the terrorists sought to leverage and she died protecting three children long after she created the opportunity to flee for herself, fellow crew, and large portion of the passengers. For her act, she was awarded India’s highest civilian honor in bravery, the Ashok Chakra Award. She acted heroically to the maximum level; however, even after hearing her story, she is not on my list of heroes. Why not? Ms. Bhanot’s actions far exceed the selfless actions of all of my heroes combined; yet, she failed to even qualify in my hero category of “honorable mention.”
Why is there the dichotomization of hero and heroic? Should a hero not act heroically?
Thus, I am proposing a paradigm change. We must stop asking “who are your heroes?” or the pathetically cliché question “if you could have lunch with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?” Gag me! Those questions do not beget the answer of one who acts heroically, but get at a different question, which should be asked overtly.
It is time that we ask the question “who are your teachers?” rather than “who are your heroes?” To ask this question, we must first accept that there is often a distinct difference between the profession of a teacher and one that teaches in a similar way that heroes and those who are heroic are not the same. I beseech you to reflect for a moment on your school teachers. They taught the lessons from a school curriculum, but few taught in the way I am attempting to convey.
I look to my parents, my friends, my colleagues, my most loathed enemy, books, my students, and everyone in between to teach me. It is through their teachings that I become a different person. They aren’t “my heroes,” but they will affect me in a deeper and more meaningful way than my heroes combined. It is through their teachings that I change how I act around others. It is through their teachings that I look upon the world with a unique lens. It is through their teachings that I try to live my life. Neerja and the coed provided incredible examples of heroism, but I will not be chancing my way of life because of their actions. However, the list at the beginning of this paragraph will forever have caused me to be different; it is through that list in which I owe my current trajectory of life.
By altering our nomenclature, we could more actively flatter our teachers for we constantly hear the words “I don’t feel like a hero;” yet, we rarely hear “I don’t feel like I taught anything of importance.”
It is our teachers that we are forever indebted to. It is our heroes that we admire for an act we will most likely never attempt.
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