When I was growing up, I believed in heroes, and heroes were plentiful. People like Peyton Manning, Steve Jobs and Michael Jackson were universally revered and respected as prime movers and innovators, as well as fundamentally good and admirable people. Skip forward to today, and the story has been flipped. The ideal idol, role model or hero has been overwhelmingly politicized and polarized to the point where there almost are no heroes left. Every hero has been killed by the pressure of intense scrutiny, the inability to stay on a moral high ground and the fact that digital activity and information about a person is preserved forever.
For an example of this type of polarization, consider the recent movie “American Sniper” about the ex-Navy Seal Chris Kyle. To many, he was the epitome of the American hero: a brave, strong soldier who chafed against his superiors and criticized politics in the theatre of war. To others, he was a symbol of militaristic society with an oversimplified attitude towards war and killing. Soon after the movie’s release, columnist Gray Whisnant blasted the movie for being oversimplified and having an emphasis on physical rather than moral courage. Many others have praised the movie including avowed liberal Jane Fonda, actor Rob Lowe and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.
The simple fact of the matter is that Chris Kyle is a hero for the lives he saved. It is too much to ask that a man take into account every consequence or every political calculation in his every action. He did what he did because he thought it would save the lives of his brothers and that is admirable without even considering his work with other veterans after he stopped fighting.
The crux of the problem is judging someone with too broad of a context, too great of scrutiny or with too much emphasis on short periods of their lives is too stringent. With these sorts of standards no one would be worth considering a hero because any hero is human and humans are bound to make mistakes at some point in their lives.
Ray Lewis most likely killed two men, yet he is still universally acclaimed as a great football player and a hero to thousands of fans. This is because his legacy as a whole is profoundly good even while considering the fact that he had made a big mistake early in his life. His offense was so egregious that if something like that happened to an athlete today it would ruin his career.
People today are too willing to jump to conclusions regarding the character and legacies of great men and women. With Peyton Manning probably set to retire, allegations of HGH abuse and a resurfacing of an old scandal could derail the final curtain on the career of a personal hero of mine. With nothing being proven yet and the relatively recent allegations compared to the length of his whole career should mean that he is free from criticism. Instead, there is talk of Peyton’s legacy as tarnished and ruined.
Many others have suffered from the harsh and unfair condemnation of public attention and opinion. President Barack Obama is a hero to many but is simultaneously condemned for reasons that are often illegitimately based. Tiger Woods cheated on his wife after the loss of his father, a man who he considered his hero and idol. He has fallen from the pantheon of heroes, but should he have?
As a polarized society we have lost our heroes and it has accelerated the polarization of mass opinion. To be without any unifying, universally respected individuals fragments society and is a symptom of and a cause of the hate and distrust that exists. Furthermore, the pursuit of perfection that has become enshrined in all that we do has manifested itself in how we view our heroes. A perfect hero, a perfect person, does not exist, and to demand that shows how extreme and inflexible we have become. The pursuit of a perfect hero is doomed to fail, and we will remain divided until we can accept our inherent imperfections and embrace them.
The condemnation of the mistakes of the great men and women among us is hypocritical. All people make mistakes and to imagine that over the course of a lifetime it is possible to keep your conscience clean is to live in a fantasy world. There are no heroes because we have destroyed them all, but what does that say about ourselves?
Sawan Patel is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at s.patel@cavalierdaily.com.
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