(Copyright © 2003 T Bruce Tober)
"I am not a hero. I just did what any decent person would have done."
Miep Gies, the Dutch secretary who helped hide and feed the family of Anne Frank
Americans (and Brits for that matter) have a too great eagerness to honour everyone who dies
in an event such as yesterday's shuttle Columbia failure as a "heroes".
According to the American Heritage dictionary, a hero is: "A person noted for feats of courage or nobility
of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life: soldiers and nurses who were heroes in
an unpopular war.... A person noted for special achievement in a particular field: the heroes of medicine."
I'm by no means denigrating the dead shuttle crew members or their tragic deaths, but they met
none of those qualifications. On the other hand the men and women, firefighters and others, who did
the rescue and attempted rescue work at the twin towers DO
qualify. Likewise, those on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field on 9/11 after the
passengers put up a brave and certain-death struggle against the hijackers, DO qualify.
As U.S. educator and critic, Paul Zweig, said in 1974, "By hero, we tend to mean a heightened
man who, more than other men, possesses qualities of courage, loyalty, resourcefulness, charisma, above all, selflessness.
He is an example of right behavior; the sort of man who risks his life to protect his society’s values, sacrificing
his personal needs for those of the community."
But aren't these people noted for special achievements in space flight and exploration?
No more so than tens of others of their predecessors and colleagues, very few (if any) of whom (almost exclusively
those who've died on missions) do we call "heroes".
But aren't they pioneers of what will one day be man's greatest achievement, space exploration?
Not really. The pioneers and therefore the real heroes whether they died or not, were the original Seven
and maybe the very next class of astronauts and the early Russian cosmonauts. They're the ones who were genuinely
risking life and limb on missions that had at most a 50/50 chance of success/survival.
It's no longer the case and hasn't been for about two decades that a hero, either living or dead, is someone who
risks his life with each flight to further science. If it were still the case, the Challenger disaster wouldn't
have been so shocking, but by then, and certainly by now, such missions are almost routinely successful.
19th Century British philosopher Herbert Spencer, said a century and a half ago that "Hero-worship
is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom."
By using the term "hero" for every disaster-related death, one devalues the term "hero", weakens
it, removes its heroic stature and turns it into a cliché.
May they rest in peace.