This one’s gonna fire up the “Fox Holes”.\u00a0 I might be chased down by patriots in pickup trucks covered in magnetic US flags made in China.<\/p>\n
Today I thought of Chris Hayes, an MSNBC anchor who was forced to apologize for a statement he made in 2012 when he said he was uncomfortable using the word “hero” to describe all soldiers returning from active duty.\u00a0 It’s an apology that was not necessary, pandering to the right all for the sake of media PR.\u00a0 I’m pretty certain Chris Hayes isn’t genuinely sorry for his statement, nor should he be.\u00a0 Veteran’s groups went crazy.\u00a0 I suppose they feel all vets are “heroes”.\u00a0 Pretentious arrogance anyone?<\/p>\n
We are at a point where the word hero has become almost meaningless.\u00a0 A young volunteer fire fighter who’s never been on a call to a fire: hero. A young EMT who’s never been on a triage call: hero.\u00a0 Hey kids, want to be a hero?\u00a0 Get any job in uniform.\u00a0 Janitor may count at this point, not real sure.\u00a0 Did I just compare our glorious men and women who serve in uniform to janitors?\u00a0 Yes I did.\u00a0 Because they serve in uniform.\u00a0 Apparently that’s all it takes anymore to achieve “hero” status.\u00a0 Many of today’s military “heroes” coming home from service were, in fact, janitors.\u00a0 Stateside telecommunication personnel who saw the most action of their tour during basic training come out of the armed services instant hero’s.\u00a0 I was at a college basketball game and actually heard an old man thank a young kid in uniform for “being a hero”.\u00a0 Politely the kid said “thank you sir”.\u00a0 I asked the kid, who was handing out brochures, what he did.\u00a0 He was a stateside mechanic before becoming a recruiter.\u00a0 Stay out of harms way there “hero”.<\/p>\n
In the former Soviet Union the title of “Hero” was officially reserved.\u00a0 If anyone was labeled a hero or called themselves a hero outside of state sanction there was a serious period of incarceration waiting for them.\u00a0 to earn the title meant you actually had to do something heroic, like oh say… turn the tide of Nazi occupation during WWII.\u00a0 The first Hero of the Soviet Union was Vasily Zaitsev who killed 225 enemy soldiers in 5 weeks.\u00a0\u00a0 Ya, he did a lot more than put on a government uniform and go to work.\u00a0 So did those honored as hero’s from the US during that same era.\u00a0 Perhaps for the sake of saving true hero’s from this soup of mediocrity we’ve concocted we should heed this lesson from the Stalinist, Communist era and quit abusing the only word we have in our language to elaborate true heroism.\u00a0 Reserve it for the real hero’s and don’t dishonor them by equating them to janitors who passed basic training and put on a uniform to earn the honor.<\/p>\n
Worst of all, we probably have recently discharged armed forces personnel running around the country right now who are full of themselves and their “hero” status despite having done nothing more than performing the duties of secretary or quarter master.\u00a0 Many of them are returning to the states and going from “hero” to unemployed the minute they are discharged.\u00a0 They should not embrace the word hero and we should not bestow it on them because unemployment wasn’t the case for those honored for true acts of heroism in previous generations.\u00a0 We dishonor our nations true hero’s with our modern abuse of this word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This one’s gonna fire up the “Fox Holes”.\u00a0 I might be chased down by patriots in pickup trucks covered in magnetic US flags made in China. Today I thought of Chris Hayes, an MSNBC anchor who was forced to apologize for a statement he made in 2012 when he said he was uncomfortable using the … Continue reading Who isn’t a “hero”?<\/span>