Not All Heroes Wear Capes

When I was growing up, my family used to go camping in Maine. We would always go to the same campground called Hadley’s Point Campground in Bar Harbor. Now this campground had a pool with a diving board, which us kids thought was the coolest thing ever. So one day my sister Meg, a couple of our friends, and I were hanging around the pool and jumping off the diving board, just having a fun time. Our group were not the only kids at the pool, there was another group of kids there but they were just minding their business and doing their own thing so there wasn't a problem or anything. However one of the times when it was my turn to use the diving board and jump into the pool one of the boys from the other group had a different idea. As I was getting ready to jump off the board he walked up behind me and pushed me off the board causing my leg to get caught along the side and me to get a large cut the length of my leg. So me being my eight year self I started crying once I got out of the pool and my leg began to bleed. Seeing this the other group started laughing and calling me a baby. Hearing this even in my upset state I felt the need to protect my honor, so you can believe that me and my chicken arms were ready to go to war with the group of boys all easily double my size.

My sister however had a different approach. She went all momma bear on the other kids, lecturing them on how dangerous their actions were and even did the unthinkable of threatening to tell a grown up, which any kid can attest to being the scariest threat there is.

Having Meg stand up for me might not seem like much, but to me she was my hero.

Heroism comes in all forms, for example most people's first reaction upon hearing this would be to think of a police officer, a firefighter, or even someone fighting for our country. All of these people have definitely more than earned their label of being heroes. More commonly though someone's hero could just be an everyday person with a much less fancy job title.

In fact the way that the media portrays heroes makes it difficult for people to see the true heroism behind someone's actions unless they have a fancy title or are wearing a cape.

This is assuming that we even learn about what they did, after all because of the current state of our world it is so common for bad things to happen. Due to how often horrific incidents happen we as a society have near constant access and exposure to the worst of our fellow mankind. This constant stream of information has led us to be almost unaffected by the current news tragedies.

Since most people are near impervious to the horrific problems of our current society, many have lost the meaning of what it truly means to be a hero. Now I do stand by my earlier statement that anyone can be a hero, however because it can sometimes feel like there are no decent people in the world heroism has lost its meaning.

This is shown time and time again when news stations report on a so called hero. Now please know that I do not in any way want to belittle anyone's actions as there are still some good people left in the world. I simply do not believe that someone should be publicly praised for doing something that actually should just be considered general human decency. After a certain amount of time it almost becomes offensive to see how much we as humans must be lacking if it is necessary for news stations to report on something as small or simple as someone helping someone else.

To put this in perspective the act of helping others is a skill that we are taught in preschool and kindergarten. Yet the fact that when we are older we apparently do this so little that it becomes newsworthy is appalling. It is so hypocritical of us to grow up to be adults and teach younger generations to be kind and help others yet we are not apparently willing to do the same. I personally would like to believe that we as people are better than this.

If we are not though, then we have problems ahead of us much larger than debating the definition of heroism and we had better hope that we raise the new generations well because they might just be our last hope for regaining our humanity.