Some of My Heroes

Tina belts out the tune "We Don't Need Another Hero". On the contrary, we are in desperate need of heroes. We need them as ideals to look up to and, most importantly, emulate. In dark times like these, it's very easy to give way to despair and hopelessness. You look around and see everyone operating on one basis: Every man for himself. Screw your neighbor. Rip off the customer. Cover up your crimes. Grab as much money from the roulette table before last call. To hell with the human race.

The Titanic is sinking fast and there's no time for our better natures to show through. It's a raw brutal race to see who survives. Darwin was right. We're no different than wild beasts on the savannah. Kill or be killed. Whoever's left standing, wins.

What makes a hero? In my book, it's someone who risks comfort, safety, liberty, wealth, the approval and acceptance of society, or even life, for principle. After a lifetime of struggle and toil, most of us have attained some degree of prosperity, comfort and affluence. Our sacrifices and deferments of gratification have paid off, and we are beginning to reap the rewards. We have accumulated enough stuff that we start altering our actions to preserve all that stuff. We don't rock the boat as much, we aren't as vocal about criticizing the government. We don't want to lose all our toys and goodies.

Heroes put it all on the line to defend a principle. They risk everything for something you can't see. It's the one thing that separates us from the lower orders. Otherwise, we are no better than wild beasts that kill, eat, defecate, sleep, copulate and reproduce.

Nothing distinguishes the cycle of our days from the animal world's like our altruistic impulse to do something that could result in our premature and untimely deaths, if only to save someone weaker and more helpless than ourselves from brutal attack by thugs. I think of Sydney Carton in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, taking the place of Charles Darnay on the scaffold. [Aside: I read the story of a Brazilian boy biking down a dirt road with his dog, when they were set upon by a huge deadly swarm of killer bees. The dog managed to knock the boy to the ground and cover him, shielding him from the bees, which stung the dog to death but the boy was saved. Now: how to explain such an altruistic impulse in the animal world? Could it be that centuries of domestication and living in proximity to humans have caused some of our better qualities to "rub off" on some of the animal kingdom?? Maybe. After I read that and thought some more about dogs' selfless devotion, loyalty and willingness to self-sacrifice, I have to qualify/amend my earlier statement about those traits that separate us from the "lower orders". End of aside]

Heroes in my life have been:
a) my late father, of course
b) Irwin Schiff
c) Ernst Zundel
d) Mordecai Vanunu
e) Joe Banister

My father for his whole life was a man of principle. He started with nothing, survived the Great Depression, fought with honor in World War II (won 9 combat stars in sea battles in the Pacific), came back home and joined his father's company rather than attend graduate school at Harvard, always dealt fairly with people in business and society. I never knew him to commit an underhanded or treacherous act towards another, although he was on occasion the recipient and victim of treachery by others. He was a pillar of the church, raised us to be moral beings (what we did with that foundation afterwards is our own fault or reward), and, I would say, many times sacrificed his own wishes, ambitions and dreams for the betterment and support of his family, who oftentimes returned his sacrifice with scorn and indifference. He exhibited selflessness on a scale I have not seen before or since in my immediate circles, and am still looking for in society at large. His kind will not be seen again in this country.

Irwin and Ernst are currently imprisoned, with no prospects for release, for "crimes" of conscience, for speaking truth to power. Mordecai has been released from a hellish 18+ year sentence of which 11, I believe, were served in solitary confinement, but he is at present under some kind of house arrest where his after-prison life is little better than before. Joe beat the Evil Empire in a criminal case after leaving the certainty of a government sinecure to tell the truth about his bosses. All my heroes could have taken an easier, more profitable route, but they didn't, and we are all the more wealthy because of their sacrifices.

I'm sure there are others, and they will be added as they surface in my crowded psyche.

You Talk Too Much!

Notice how many talk shows there are on TV? On the radio? We Americans have replaced real deeds with talk of real deeds. For instance: the more our teachers talk about "excellence in education", the less excellence one finds in schools. The more our politicians talk about accountability, the less accountable and more corrupt they become.
Talk has become a substitute for action. And it's not even interesting or inspiring speech that emanates from the "talking heads".
When action does come, it comes across as hysterical overreaction and overkill: laying waste to a Third-World country that couldn't even occupy one of our inner-city neighborhoods if it tried (do we really feel like conquerors...and our pathetic excuses for leaders imagine themselves to be in the mold of Alexander the Great or Frederick of Prussia?); sending a 400-plus-strong SWAT team of FBI and BATF agents to "take down" Randy Weaver and his family, killing his unarmed wife, dog and wounding his teenaged son; massacreing religious isolationists and innocents at Waco, Texas.
It's also reflected in our shift from a manufacturing/farming/mining/shipping/timber economy to a "service" economy. We don't make things anymore, instead we serve...people who do? No, it's all been outsourced, offshored.
A "service" economy presupposes that there are doers, makers, inventors who produce tangible goods that people are willing to spend money on. I recall an article about the threatened closing of a car plant near my house. The report highlighted...who? The people on the assembly line soon to be idled? The foremen? No, it was the waitresses in the nearby restaurants where the auto workers went for lunch every day; the strip malls and surrounding stores where the plant workers did their shopping. Because the car plant produced something tangible, something useful, something that would enable other people to be themselves more productive, all manner of "services" had sprung up around it. But once the assembly line is shut down, the plant shuttered and rusting, all those "service" industries will wither and die. There have to be producers for the service "industry" to serve.
Will we continue to be a world power -- swaggering around the globe pounding tinpot dictatorships into dust -- when we no longer make things, like our soldiers' uniforms, the weapons systems they wield, the troop transports, ships and jeeps? What do we do when China -- as in "Made In" -- declares war on us and we have already surrendered all our manufacturing to them?