(Dobbs) Heroes Aren't Who You Might Think They Are
The definition is simple: put yourself at risk to help someone else.
It may be more important to be reminded of this than many realize: the quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs is not a hero. Although he played yesterday with a sprained ankle yet still led his team to victory and, for the third time in four years, took them back to the Super Bowl, he is not a hero. Patrick Mahomes is an idol, he is an icon, maybe he’s the ideal of an athlete. But although fans salute him as a “hero,” a hero he is not.
Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, they’re not heroes either. They play heroes on the big screen, but aside from the macho stunts some of them do in their own movies, usually the biggest risk they take is that their box office receipts won’t live up to expectations.
Heroes don’t have to be bigger than life. Typically they’re not. Heroes usually are people you never heard of. People like Brandon Tsay. He’s a hero. And Richard Fierro and Thomas James. They are heroes.
Tsay is the guy who was working in the ticket office at the Lai Lai Ballroom in Southern California a week and a half ago when an older man who had just murdered ten people and injured ten more at another dance club walked in with a semi-automatic assault weapon and pointed it straight at him. As security video from the ballroom shows, Tsay jumped the gunman and in their struggle for the weapon, the gunman slammed Tsay in his face and on his head.
But Tsay kept fighting, later telling reporters, “If I let go of this gun, what would happen to me, the people around me, my friends, my family?”
That is heroism, risking your security to save others’.
Fierro and James are the heroes who took down the man who murdered five people and injured 17 others with a military-style assault rifle last November at Club Q in Colorado Springs. Fierro, a retired veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who was twice awarded the Bronze Star for heroism, was at the nightclub with his family, watching a drag show, when the gunman opened fire. Ducking bullets flying in every direction, he ran across the room, pulled the gunman to the floor, jumped on top of him, grabbed his pistol, and repeatedly hit him in the head with it. What he said afterward was, “I just knew I had to take him down.”
Thomas James was the next man in the melee at Club Q, helping knock down and pin down the killer and getting his guns out of his reach. The U.S. Navy Petty Officer was hurt himself and subsequently hospitalized but said afterward of his heroics at the gay nightclub, which had become his own haven, “I simply wanted to save the family I found.” Of course, everyone there wanted to. James did. The risks he and Fierro took, despite the deadly danger to their own lives, saved others’.
That is heroism. By my definition, the highest kind. But heroism comes in other forms too.
Like Ukraine’s President Zelensky. Almost a year ago now, just a couple of days into the war that Russia started, the United States offered to help get Zelensky out, where he could run a shadow government from a safer place. His response? “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
The moment he said those words, he had to know that he was pinning a target to his chest, that Russia would not rest until he was crushed. Although reportedly he no longer even sleeps in the same place twice and his family is in danger too, he hasn’t removed the target.
That is heroism.
Or Liz Cheney. The moment this rock-solid conservative took on Donald Trump, going up against what has become the cult of the Republican Party, she had to know it could cost her not just her leadership position in the House Republican Caucus but her very seat in Congress itself. And it did. After she accepted assignment to the January 6th Committee, her position in the leadership of the House was yanked away, her own party in Wyoming censured her, then her own voters deposed her. She consciously put everything she had worked for on the line. And lost it.
But she didn’t desist, she didn’t forfeit her integrity, she didn’t compromise her principles. What she did was defend democracy at the highest possible political price.
Defending democracy. That too is a kind of heroism.
Susan B. Anthony, who despite arrests wouldn’t forsake her crusade for women’s rights. Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years behind bars but wouldn’t abandon his ambition to end apartheid. Rosa Parks, who wouldn’t move to the back of the bus. Doctors and nurses, teachers and grocery store clerks, who wouldn’t renounce their responsibilities in the most infectious phases of the pandemic.
Too often in our celebrity-centric society, the wrong people are treated like heroes and the right ones aren’t. I once asked some average Americans who their heroes were for a story I was doing, and I got answers that made me cringe. They described sports stars and movie stars. But they couldn’t come up with a single name of someone who had put everything at risk to change a life, sometimes to save one. Like the real-life heroes in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 who put their lives on the line to save others at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then those who enlisted in the military to fight for their country.
During that terrible time, I heard an interview with a professional athlete named Todd Helton, the all-star first baseman for the Colorado Rockies. Although I must paraphrase his words because they have been lost over time, I’ve never forgotten the message behind them. It was that finally, Americans could see that a sportsman like him was not a “hero” for his triumphs at the ballpark because now, they could see who the real heroes were.
But we have forgotten before and we will forget again. Until another ordinary American, responding to an extraordinary threat, reminds us.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Yes, we often confuse the definition of hero by how much money a sports star wins by playing his/her game, even if we realize it takes heroic effort to win.
Thanks Greg....well worth this reminder. Popular culture has cheapened everything, including what the attributes of a hero should be.