Where Are the Heroes?
Is it time to remove the term from our vocabulary?
“Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as be seen as a people with such responsibilities.”
— Theodore Roosevelt, 1905
The word “hero” once belonged to the province of myth, bestowed on the half-divine figures who strode the stage of Homer’s epics or illuminated the margins of medieval chronicles.
Achilles in his rage, Beowulf in his long night’s battle with Grendel, Joan of Arc at the stake — such figures lived and died not in pursuit of comfort but of destiny, their stories kept alive because they bore the burden of something larger than themselves.
To call someone a hero was to suggest that courage, sacrifice, and fate conspired to place a single human life at…
