Where Do Heroes Come From?
Says You: are we rearing a nation of wimps?
Posted by Rebecca Teti
in Family
on Monday, August 11, 2008 7:30 AM
With the first edition of Says You (About Bullies)—and Danielle’s follow-up—under our belts, I want to push the discussion of how we train our kids to react to danger a little bit further.
I think the movie Titanic is one of the most pernicious films ever made (bear with me, I’m building to a point). One of the pastors at our parish dubbed it “Sex On A Boat” and suggested when the Leo DiCaprio character sank to the floor of the ocean, he wouldn’t have stopped there. What I resent more is the historical calumny the movie perpetrates. In the film, the privileged classes lock the poor people into the lower decks so they can’t escape, assuring themselves places in the life boats. Actually the reverse happened; the wealthy felt a sense of noblesse oblige and loaded the rescue boats with women and children—especially the poor—first. The rich passengers disproportionately went down with the ship. Asked why, in a film so careful to reconstruct the physics of the sinking accurately, he didn’t portray the heroism involved in rescuing those who were saved as well, the director said no one would believe it.
My question for you is: why was that generation, faced with mortal peril, capable of marshaling its energies for an organized rescue effort that saved the maximum number of people possible, rather than descending into “every man for himself” chaos?
Here are a few more recent stories that have caught my eye in the past few years. Last summer it took two grandfathers to help a flight attendant restrain a threatening, unruly passenger. The younger people on the plane—folks in their 20s, 30s and 40s presumably more fit for such work—sat passively, wouldn’t make eye contact with those asking for help, and in some cases cried.
When we think of terrible school shooting incidents, the popular imagination seems to focus on what motivates the killers: what did the parents do wrong? I’m more interested in knowing what the parents of Nick & Adam Foss did right. They’re the twin boys who rescued dozens of younger kids at Columbine, even carrying out some who were frozen with terror. Nick described his experience this way:
I just decided to take a stand. I was tired of being scared. We didn’t have any defenses. But if my life was on the line, I wasn’t going to get bombed in some stupid bathroom.
What I am about to say is a little delicate, so please understand I am not rebuking anyone for fear. I was once held up at gunpoint and recall what it was like to freeze utterly before I got a grip on myself and could think. But it’s been suggested that the Virginia Tech shooting incident would have been much less deadly if, instead of everyone diving under desks for safety, the students had banded together and rushed the shooter. Why did no one think of that? They weren’t helpless children, they were 19-yr-old young adults.
That leads me to the commencement address Ronald Reagan gave at the Citadel a few years after leaving office. He reminds the audience of the heroism of Arland Williams, a Citadel grad who was aboard the Air Florida flight that crashed into the Potomac River in January, 1982.
He survived the impact of the crash and found himself with a small group of other survivors struggling to stay afloat in the near-frozen river. And then, suddenly, there was hope—a park police helicopter appeared overhead, trailing a lifeline to the outstretched hands below, a lifeline that could carry but a few of the victims to the safety of the shore. News cameramen, watching helplessly, recorded the scene as the man in the water repeatedly handed the rope to the others, refusing to save himself until the first one, then two, then three and four, and finally five of his fellow passengers had been rescued. But when the helicopter returned for one final trip, the trip that would rescue the man who had passed the rope, it was too late. He had slipped at last beneath the waves with the sinking wreckage—the only one of 79 fatalities in the disaster who lost his life after the accident itself.
President Reagan then asks the question I’m asking: where does heroism come from?
Sometimes, you see, life gives us what we think is fair warning of the choices that will shape our future. On such occasions, we are able to look far along the path, up ahead to that distant point in the woods where the poet’s “two roads” diverge. And then, if we are wise, we will take time to think and reflect before choosing which road to take before the junction is reached.
But such occasions, in fact, are rather rare—far rarer, I suspect, than the confident eyes of one’s early twenties can quite perceive. Far more often than we can comfortably admit, the most crucial of life’s moments come like the scriptural “thief in the night.” Suddenly and without notice, the crisis is upon us and the moment of choice is at hand—a moment fraught with import for ourselves, and for all who are depending on the choice we make. We find ourselves, if you will, plunged without warning into the icy water, where the currents of moral consequence run swift and deep, and where our fellow man - and yes, I believe our Maker—are waiting to see whether we will pass the rope.
Then he provides this answer: the character that takes command in times of crisis has already been determined.
It has been determined by a thousand other choices made earlier in seemingly unimportant moments. It has been determined by all the little choices of years past—by all those times when the voice of conscience was at war with the voice of temptation—whispering the lie that it really doesn’t matter. It has been determined by all the day-to-day decisions made when life seemed easy and crises seemed far away—the decisions that, piece by piece, bit by bit, developed habits of discipline or of laziness, habits of self-sacrifice or of self-indulgence, habits of duty and honor and integrity—or dishonor and shame.
Because when life does get tough, and the crisis is undeniably at hand—when we must, in an instant look inward for strength of character to see us through—we will find nothing inside ourselves that we have not already put there.
I’m not calling for baby boot camp. I take it as given that children, particularly little children, but even older ones, need the nuzzling and nurturing that moms are expert at. It’s the basic platform for their self-confidence and knowledge that God loves them. But maybe, just maybe, the pat advice I know I was given in school: do what the gunman says, keep yourself alive at all costs, is not really adequate advice? I don’t want my kids to die over shoes or a jacket. But I also hope if they ever face a crisis, they’ll try to help others. I hope they’re more like the heroic grandpas than the cowering youths. How do we raise children like that?
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