The Quiet Hero

There’s a Capital One commercial that has Derek Jeter and astronaut Karen Nyberg, and, of course, the Capital One Bank Guy at Career Day in a school. The kids are all gushing over the Capital One guy. Nyberg says something along the lines of, aren’t you a famous ball player? Jeter responds, didn’t you go into space? We’re supposed to laugh, ha ha, because the kids are hero-worshipping a bank guy.

There’s been a lot of talk about heroes lately on multiple levels: that we don’t have them anymore, or that they are all around us, or that we’re hero-worshipping anti-heroes, or that they can only be found in fiction, etc. I’ve even seen arguments that even in fiction, we don’t need heroes, a protagonist or antagonist. A slice of life is just fine.

Maybe. I want a compelling character I care about, to see them rise to the occasion, or even in stumbling, at some point overcome their obstacles and through that struggle grow their own character.

Someone called me heroic the other day for enduring cancer treatments. I blanch at that assessment. I’m selfishly trying to survive. Of course, like the two million annually diagnosed with this disease, that means I’m going to avail myself of all the things that might help, even if they make me miserable. The part where I’ve now joined a research study to determine whether a patient can actually survive this experimental treatment (which has already led to one study participant’s death) has some altruism to it, some “selflessness” in the sense that I could be martyring myself for science. But I chose to participate for the selfish act of not wanting to die.

There’s a balance, I think, in heroism. Even the most heroic character has a certain amount of selfishness at her core, whether it’s to achieve some goal or prove something. But there’s also a certain amount of bravery that goes into the equation. There’s something in taking those acts beyond the selfish that is a study in one’s personal mettle.

A friend of mine recently received his 15 minutes of fame by expressing the depth of his anger, in no uncertain terms, over the death of Alex Pretti and the excesses of the ICE/DHS deployment to Minnesota. To me, his act of speaking out to a major news outlet was brave. He put his face, his name and his business in front of millions in a time of extreme division and at risk of reprisals from a vindictive administration. As a no longer young person, he waded through clouds of tear gas to witness and honor Pretti, who lost his life trying to defend a woman who had been pushed to the ground and pepper sprayed. Some called him a hero.

Among his neighbors, others shelter children, run errands for those who fear leaving their homes, honk horns and blow whistles and risk arrest to witness and represent. Others stand outside the Whipple detention center offering aid to those released without phones, proper clothing, or a ride home. These, in my mind, are acts of bravery. The risks involved are real: a mother of three and a VA nurse died. Others suffered injury, some permanent, from “less lethal” weapons, or were detained long enough to lose jobs or have their vehicles towed … somewhere, or their property destroyed.

Are they heroes? Were tens of thousands of Minnesotans who “showed up” heroes?

Let’s come back to this.

What’s a hero, why do we seek them?

“Real heroes are those who risk their lives to save lives.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

The definitions of hero run the gamut. Taking us from the mythological legendary figures, often of divine descent who achieved great deeds, to the personal heroism of courage or prowess, to the mundane sense of those we look up to for their noble or principled qualities.

We also have the heroes of literature, where a protagonist may rise to the level of heroic based on the epic journey and trials and tribulations they might encounter. We might think of Odysseus, Heracles, or even Arachne, or perhaps a Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, or Atticus Finch; or maybe an Aragorn, Frodo Baggins, and Gandalf or a Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Dumbledore. Maybe it’s a Jack Ryan, Jason Bourne, or a James Bond. The features that draw us to these characters, from perseverance to nobility, and honor to courage, are as individual as each character and how they inspire us.

We find heroes in those who step up, who do more, who perhaps saved the lives of others at the risk of their own. Altruism leads firefighters to run into a burning building, or soldiers to race onto a battlefield to rescue an injured comrade, or a stranger to dive into a river to save someone they don’t know.

Ask most children who their heroes are, it’s someone fictional from a superhero franchise. The suite of superheroes, dozens, most introduced through Dark Horse Comics, Marvel and DC Comics, are road maps for the powerless child. They can imagine themselves empowered, most often to enact justice and do good.

Heroism provides a guide to basic survival by providing cognitive, motivational, emotional and spiritual models; it can be a map for social growth and existential and creative benefits.

Psychology Today lists 12 functions of heroes from a social science study of heroism:

“Heroes give us hope.
Heroes energize us.
Heroes develop us.
Heroes heal us.
Heroes impart wisdom.
Heroes are role models for morality.
Heroes offer safety and protection.
Heroes give us positive emotions.
Heroes give us meaning and purpose.
Heroes provide social connection and reduce loneliness.
Heroes help individuals achieve personal goals.”

According to Scott La Barge, writing for the Santa Clara Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, for the ancient Greeks, “a hero was a mortal who had done something so far beyond the normal scope of human experience that he left an immortal memory behind him when he died, and thus received worship like that due the gods.“

A hero’s achievements might be extraordinary, but heroes don’t have to be perfect, or overall “good.”

LaBarge connects our hero worship to a “possibility” that humans could attain. And thus, virtues and ideals we want to see in ourselves can be found in the heroes we want to emulate or adore.

But who we see as a hero is a personal choice. We might choose someone who has been a leader or trailblazer, say a Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or we might choose an entertainer or athlete whose morality or virtues might be less obvious than their other talents.

Or perhaps the hero one chooses is really an anti-hero, a drug lord or dictator: seeing financial success or power as something one wants for oneself. The current U.S President has not shied from praising authoritarian leaders he admires.

And of course, no hero is without flaws: whether it’s ego, hubris, or being caught in some kind of scandal involving sex or money. Human heroes, whether in fiction or real life, are human: perfection is impossible. Even the superheroes have their kryptonite.

The Hero’s Journey

Joseph Campbell identified the hero’s journey as a universal theme, where the hero leaves the mundane world (willingly or unwillingly) to enter a supernatural place, survives some series of trials, then returns with special powers to help the ordinary world. He identified archetypes: hero, villain, ally, mentor, guardian, herald, shapeshifter, trickster, temptress (or temptation). Examples of these archetype heroes can be seen in stories from Lucas’s Star Wars to Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, from Alice’s journey to Wonderland to Bilbo’s journey to the Lonely Mountain.

Such universal themes resonate with us due to cultural norms, which for many of the examples are Western in their construction. By their nature, they are stereotypes. The internet abounds with guides for using Campbell’s archetypes for writing scripts or to map fiction. “Archetypes allow the writer to use these “metaphorical truths”—a playful deceiver, a maternal bond, a person of innocence and purity—to deeply and empathetically connect with the reader through symbolism” and provide templates to build on the various steps in Campbell’s model, notes one writer’s guide site.

No Universals

Long ago, I took a Folklore class at UW-Madison from the late Harold Scheub, who crisscrossed the African continent as a young scholar, collecting oral stories that he compiled. He brought these stories to life on a classroom stage. They often included heroes, and villains, and journeys and magical transformations. But they seldom followed the “hero’s journey” archetypes. These aren’t universal themes. They are common, yes. In fiction.

Now, a small confession, I realize in my own writing that all of my novels in some respect follow a bit of that hero’s journey construct: they move from their mundane sense of the normal. They undergo tests and trials, often failing. They draw on the guidance, often, from others in achieving their goals and in the end … well, in none of my novels does their “return to the world” fit Campbell’s universal model. Sometimes it’s the world that has changed. Sometimes while our hero is changed, their return to the world doesn’t involve some great and powerful gift to humanity.

What makes heroes, what even makes them in fiction, really is about why it resonates with us: What rites of passage, what obstacles we face in achieving a goal, things we feel in the journey of becoming who we are, how we are changed by what we’ve endured. It isn’t all just about deeds accomplished, but what that experience does to us.

Most (if not all) of our real-life heroes aren’t experiencing some supernatural experience, or returning with special powers to fix the world. We have to work with our ordinary human abilities.

The Quiet Heroes

“Some heroes wake up and carry on, when carrying on is an intolerable burden: weighted with obscurity, loaded with loneliness, acknowledged by none – these are the quiet heroes we should call by one thousand holy names.”
― Judy Croome

If there’s something Minneapolis shows us—that the simple heroes in so many fictional tales tell us—it’s really that we are the answer to our problems. We need to take that measure of hope, or strength, or moral courage, or perseverance, or model of success from people like us who step up. We are the ordinary heroes who face extraordinary circumstances. The heroes of our fiction, of our real world, often are ordinary folk thrust into the extraordinary: and they persevere.

Heroism is about looking beyond ourselves for a moment, feeling that altruistic urge, the thing that makes us leap into action to help a stranger. It’s that moment that we see ourselves as part of a society and act on its behalf. It’s the moment we dispense with the “me first” attitude that took hold in the 1980s, the mercenary approach to “I got mine, screw you.”

We ordinary folk look at what’s happening around us: the brutalization of people who are in the country legally, following rules, or brought here as children, or even American citizens exercising their civil rights—who are treated as sub-human criminals and domestic terrorists simply for having been born in another country, for not having English as a first language, for genes that express melanin, for witnessing, or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time—and feel hopeless. We may feel as if we are powerless to protect our communities or feel unanchored in a country that could do this in our name.

It’s in such times we seek heroes, and might feel like we’re at a loss to find them in the usual places.

Lynn Schmidt recently wrote:

“The American people have not lost their moral compass. Rather, they have lost faith that their elected leaders share it. We are not descending into barbarism, as [David] Brooks fears. Instead, the values held by ordinary Americans are profoundly disassociated with those practiced by the powerful and connected.

“The goodness seen overflowing in communities across this nation proves that our shared conception of the sacred remains intact. Americans still know what is true, beautiful and good. We still recognize justice, compassion and human dignity.

“The challenge is not to rediscover our values, but to ensure our institutions again reflect them. Nothing is wrong with America that cannot be fixed by what is right with America, and what is right with America is the decency of its people.”

We are the heroes we need. We are the solution to our problems. We are the quiet heroes when we take a stand: we are someone’s role model.

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was a light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

Cover photo art by  Gourdaine Sébastien-Louis Guillaume Norblin of Greek heroine Antigone, who defies King Creon who has forbidden the burial or mourning of her brother Polynices. In turn, Creon orders her death; but changes his mind since she is betrothed to his son. When he goes to free her, he finds she has killed herself, according to the play by Sophocles. Wlkimedia Commons.

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