I don't even know what this is. But I wrote it, and I like it (even though it's just a draft) and it's the first thing I've written in months. So.
__________________________
Doesn’t everyone want to be a hero? Probably not: I’m a realist, and people can be really shitty. But even really awful people can pull out acts of compassion, of self-sacrifice, from somewhere. Most people, though, have a hero-fantasy. They want to save the girl, save the day, save the world.
But then you have to think about what construes a hero or heroine anyway. On the surface of the matter, it’s a no-brainer, easy as pie – a hero is someone who saves. The solider who humps her injured buddy 30 klicks through enemy territory to safety, the teacher who throws his body in front of a bullet for his student, the bystander who sees a woman dragged into an alley on his way home from a few after-work beers, goes into the alley and punches some would-be rapist in the nose. Pretty easy to say that’s heroic. They took a risk, they saved the day and most of all, they stood. They stood up, or walked, or crawled, to do what was right.
Those are pretty easy definitions.
But then it gets dicey. We have heroes embedded in our cultures – all cultures, daresay, though I’m sure some anthropologist could dig up a case study from somewhere and throw it at me. Maybe. Someone always wants to prove someone wrong, after all. It feels good. But think about it. We’ve got Gilgamesh, Aeneas, Theseus, Brunhilde, King Arthur, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman. Mythology, popular culture. And check out the media – “Local Hero Saves Child From Speeding Car,” “Heroic Woman Pulls Man From Under Car”. Hell, we have “Hero Guinea Pig Alerts Family To Fire.”
And then there’s the quiet heroes, the ones who don’t step in front of a car or dash into a fire. Years of grinding study to become a pediatrician; heck, not even a cancer researcher or an epidemiologist. Just Dr. Brown from down the street, who diagnoses pneumonia in Molly and Brad’s three-year-old and gives them a prescription. Little Johnny has a miserable month, and goes back to playing with Legos and waking Molly and Brad up to soon on Saturday mornings. The exhausted social worker who eats mac-and-cheese and drives a beater that really needs a new transmission, who goes into the shelter five days a week and talks to angry women, some of them drug users or child abusers. But Margarita’s twice-weekly groups are there for Racquell, and she finally leaves her man, and this time for good. Raquell gets a shitty job, but a job, one that D’monte said she was too stupid and lazy to get, and she pays for her crappy studio apartment and one day, she meets Lavonne. And he is a good man, and they marry, and have a perfectly boring life, a ordinarily lovely child, and they get into fights about money, sure, but Lavonne never raises a hand to her or calls her a stupid whore. Because Margarita helped her understand that she wasn’t. Had never been.
That’s a hero, too. And they don’t get the accolades and the pretty words or the keys to the city. But it doesn’t take that to make a hero.
We want heroes. We need heroes. And we want to be them, and sometimes we need to be them. And my god, do we love the biggies, the ones who straight up dash in in their flaring capes or their firemen’s gear and look death in the eye, shoulder him aside and say “Fuck you, get outta my way, I am DOING THIS.” We like to see it in the recycled cool of a movie theater with surround sound; we like to see it while munching chips in our underwear on a Tuesday night in front of the TV; we stare at it on the pages of a comic or a novel, and we click on links that take us to the Hero, The Heroine, the One Who Did.
But there’s always a price. And that’s why we love our heroes so much, because we don’t know if our pockets hold that coin. Things is, we have this sneaking suspicion that everyone’s pocket holds that coin, that hero-price, that shining, glittering piece of truest gold. And we don’t want to pay (continued...)