What About Heroes?

 With all of the anger, violence and desecration of public property over the last few months, I've been thinking a lot about heroes.

What is a hero? Google defines a hero as a person who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements or noble qualities.

As a writer of children's historical fiction, heroes are part of my everyday work. From a writer's point of view, even an extraordinary hero needs to be believable. While a hero can be courageous, accomplish amazing tasks and display a firmness of character that is truly admirable, that character must also show vulnerability. Perhaps they have doubts or weaknesses with which they struggle and which impede their progress towards goals. Man's struggle with himself is a major theme in literary works throughout time. A perfect hero is not believable. We cannot identify with such a person. They cannot inspire us to greater heights.

Perhaps part of the problem is with the word "idealize". To idealize someone is to regard them as being perfect or better than they actually are. We have made them bigger than life. In past times, there was a lot of idealizing of public historical figures. When people are idealized, it is only a matter of time before the truth is revealed and our admiration not only wanes, but plummets and anger and cynicism sets in. 

Another important point is that to understand someone from the past, we need to understand them within their own historical context. To judge someone from another culture or time based on our own contextual beliefs and values is shortsighted and unfair.

Take my great great grandmother Mary Ann, for instance. She and her brother left their home in England to emigrate to the western United States, when she was twenty and he was eighteen. They arrived safely in America, but her brother died of mountain fever during their overland travel by ox team. Upon arriving at their destination, Mary Ann found herself completely alone. She married a man she barely knew and they had thirteen children. At age thirty, Mary Ann lost her vision. She never saw eight of her children. To make matters more difficult, she was left a widow at age forty-five when several of her children were still young. Somehow she managed.

Mary Ann's daughter, Eliza, my great grandmother, emigrated to Canada. When Eliza's husband died, Mary Ann rode a train, blind and unaided, all the way to Canada, to stay with Eliza and help her for a year following her husband's death.Was she extraordinary or was she crazy? That depends on how you look at it. If you judge her by today's standards, she made many decisions that we might not make. For example, why would you have eight more children after you were blind? If you look at her life within her own context, she did hard things because she had to do them and displayed great courage by going going beyond to do hard things she didn't have to do.

It's unfortunate that all I have are stories about her, but nothing in her own words. I value diaries and journals written by people from the past because that is the only way to truly see into their world and understand their perspectives and motivations. 

So while we're crashing, burning and discarding these heroes from the past we should ask ourselves a few questions. Were they admirable within their own time and context? Did they exalt themselves or who was it that idealized them? When we disregard them as unfitting role models for today, was there anything they should be remembered for or are we casting them aside completely, without giving credit where credit is due? And lastly, what does it mean to live in a world without heroes?