I’m sure if we were asked to define a “hero,” various trite answers would follow. Someone who saves lives, my mom, my dad. We never define a hero as something concrete, we define them as various people, which muddies the water even further and thus the cycle to answer the question “What is a hero?” continues. It is a quest to define the dynamic and undefinable.
In several articles that have surfaced on the internet the need to play “pin the hero on the unsuspecting” becomes clear.
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This matter perhaps became most salient following the release of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, a biopic based on Chris Kyle, the “most lethal sniper in U.S. military history” (this, taken verbatim from the memoir of the same name). Following the film’s release, the question of “Is Chris Kyle a hero?” plagued the internet, the sides divisive and sometimes caustic in the arguments and rebuttals.
However, in the welter of this conflict a single question arises: Exactly why do we feel the need to label human beings as heroes? Does their significance wax and wane according to the two syllables contained in this word? Heroism today seems to connote that all one’s actions are carefully calculated, and somewhere in this calculation arises something Herculean.
Our drive to separate and ultimately be the arbiter of who is a hero and who is a foe is part of the larger good versus evil dichotomy. This good versus evil dichotomy contends that things can either be separated into two categories: good or evil.
Upon closer inspection however, this dualism, and by extension, our definition and arbitration of who and what is a hero reflects a great deal of narcissism. We see the alleged hero as an extension of our own beliefs and person, the older sister we never had, the contrarian to our convention and conformity, the crab who braves the world sans his shell. This elusive title is the homecoming queen announced at a game of paper football.
The need to constantly define who and what a hero is more than just an issue of semantics, it’s our need to label to the extreme.
We could be heroes, but we could also just be people too.
