The New American Hero

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It did not matter how many divorces the average Hollywood movie star had been through, how many illegal drugs they might have abused, or how many abandoned children they may have sired. We followed these heroes in and out of rehab, in and out of custody battles, and in and out of lurid scandals. Throughout all this, our worship remained in tact, although we are always willing to welcome new inhabitants of the celebrity fishbowl. Demi Moore moved over to let Catherine Zeta Jones in, Kobe Bryant filled the shoes left by Michael Jordan.

But last week in America, all this changed. Amidst the rubble and the smoke emerged a hero not celebrated for their mimicry in front of a movie camera, or their shapeliness in a bikini, or their ability to throw a ball through a hoop. As we watched with sadness, shock and anger at the devastation caused by the brute terrorists, we began to admire men and women who are near the bottom of the earning ladder but at the pinnacle of the hero’s summit.

Our collective consciousness became focused on those who helped others: the firefighter, racked with grief but firm with resolve, the people of New York who had to be turned away from the blood banks when too many showed to give of their very life so that others might live. We sat riveted to our television sets in the hope that one of the rescuers would save someone from the rubble. In the midst of all this true heroism, the deeds of movie stars and athletes seemed so, well, ordinary. Who really cared if someone stepped out in a Versace dress, or if someone’s batting average improved over the last week?

Those were such minor accomplishments when compared with the heroism of those who were walking through the valley of the shadow of death so that they might bring a soul or two the land of the living. Miraculously, in the week following the WTC bombings, the gossip columnists curbed their columns- so transfixed were we as a nation on those that were actually doing something worthwhile, that we had no energy, or desire to focus on the shallow and trivial.

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