One day in school my teacher asked the class who their hero was. �Wayne Gretzky, Cameron Diaz, Avril Lavigne�� Almost all sports figures and celebrities. But what have these people actually done? Yes they�ve all done extraordinary things, but does that really make them a hero? These celebrities fill the front pages of the newspapers and magazines but deep inside the papers there are stories of real heroism. Stories about people turning others lives around and saving lives. Some say that heroes are disappearing from our society, but I�d have to say that that�s not really true. The only thing that has ever really changed is what we acknowledge as heroism.
Every year millions of people tune into the Oscars, the Grammy�s and the Olympics, but how many people would watch an award show for heroes? I asked a lot of people if they would and almost everyone said no. �It would be too boring.� This is probably the fault of the media. Stories of real heroism are almost never as exciting as the ones we can see in the theaters. It looks like people are more interested in heroes on TV and in the movies than real ones.
We turn on the TV and see a cop saving someone�s life. We think that we�ve finally caught heroism in the act. Then we find out that we�re watching Law and Order. There are so many heroes in the movies and on TV and that�s ok. Those heroes are great examples for the most part. We run into problems when the people acting on screen are thought to be as heroic as the characters they�re playing. This is part of the reason that media heroes began to be idolized more than real ones. Its seems that our knights in shining armor are fighting robot dragons rather than real ones.
As we look back to the past we can find so many heroes: Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander the Great and Kennedy just to name a few. It�s much more difficult to think of a present day hero. Most people that come to mind are the kind of heroes I�ve been talking about; athletes, musicians, actors... Even the American historian Arthur Schlesinger once wrote �Ours is an age without heroes.� Yet he wrote that less than two years before Kennedy was elected and now Kennedy is regarded as one of the greatest heroes of the last century. I think it�s difficult to recognize heroes in your own age since you often don�t realize what you have until you lose it. I�m sure that even in the day of Kennedy people focused on media heroes.
We have always had heroes and media heroes. Our heroes are still around us every day. There are still our knights in shining armor slaying real dragons alongside the media heroes and their robot ones. There will always be heroes as long as there are men.
