Hero

Everyone bats the word “hero” around pretty loosely. Like it’s a good thing to be, something we should all want to be. Some guy saves a girl from a burning car, he’s a hero. Some cop shoots a bad guy before he can rob a c-store—he’s a hero. Some dying woman donates her kidney so a young girl can live and presto==- she’s a hero. One shot deal—do something extraordinary and poof! You’re a hero.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking what those one shot heroes do. Saving a life, donating an organ—al really cool important things. The world needs these one shot heroes. Maybe now more than ever. And that’s because the every day heroes are all gone.

I sometimes wonder if these one shot heroes ever think about what it would be like to have to do heroic things every day. Not just once. All. The. Time. To be at a city’s call. To take on responsibility for over a million lives. To know that every time someone died or you didn’t get there in time or you just p[lain screwed up, it was your fault. And no one, especially not the media, would ever let you forget it. One shot heroes have it easy. They become heroes after they do their fantastic deed and no one ever expects them to do anything more , or second guesses them and says, well how come they didn’t do this, or why didn’t they get there sooner? Day to day heroes, people who are heroic as a job or an obligation or a responsibility—face this all the time. Everyone’s an arm chair hero, like a Monday morning quarterback. It’s easy to see what you should’ve done. Afterwards. A lot harder to see it at the time, when everything’s going to hell in a hand basket and you have to come up with a solution in the time it take normal people to blink and you don’t know how the other guy will react or whether it’ll even work./..

Being a hero sucks.