Heroes: to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield *
After watching the public mourning and state funeral for Jack Layton last week, I started thinking about heroes. Why is someone considered a hero? I checked the library's recommended websites and found 35 links to sites about heroes ranging from Celebrating Women's Achievements, to Sporting Heroes, and Veterans Affairs Canada, to Bulfinch's mythology: the age of fable or stories of gods and heroes.
In 2004,Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian Medicare, was voted number one in CBC's The Greatest Canadian Contest, ahead of Sir John A Macdonald, Terry Fox, Frederick Banting and Wayne Gretzky to name but a few. Why was Douglas chosen over the other 99 nominees?
Authors Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals, asked 450 people about their heroes and based on the respondents' answers, identified some similar characteristics. Individuals
may be seen as heroes for their competence and achievement in specific domains or for their commitment to and sacrifice for the welfare of others…. They beckon us toward attaining our highest possible levels of competence and morality. We need them, and we are lucky to have them. In the final analysis, human beings create heroes and villans to both energize and guide their thinking and behavior (sic).
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| Are you inspired by people like Craig Kielburger who started Free the Children,the world's largest network of children helping children? | Choose your hero from among these portraits of Canadians from popular culture, politics, and business who left their mark on Canada and the world. | Who can forget Canada's fallen soldiers as they are driven down the 172-kilometre stretch of highway between Trenton and Toronto, the Highway of Heroes. |
Or are you energized by young Canadian athletes like Marilyn Bell who was the first to swim across Lake Ontario, and the youngest person to swim the English Channel in 1955?
Disappointed that you are not a hero? Take heart; according to Will Rogers "we can't all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by".
* from Ulysses, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson(1809–1892), written in 1833.
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