I'm deciding to take a little different route than I normally take with these posts. For this one, I'm sharing my inspiration for the day in video-blog format. I share with my
audience anything and everything that I am passionate about as I research to
discover more about the topics that I am interested in. This is my first post as a video. I am excited to see how all of you respond to
the change in my style of blogging and the different ways that I am now able to
express my topics. I decided to start in
an area that you have all seen me write about several times before since it is
very dear to my heart—the hero. In this
video I will take you through my process of defining who the hero is and how
the lines between hero and celebrity have often been blurred in recent
years. I will bring you along with me
through this discovery to encourage you, my readers and watchers, to think
deeper about the people that you use the word hero to describe and decide
whether they are truly worthy of that title.
In order to
walk you through my process, I started at the very beginning—where the idea of
the hero was born for me, in the books I read and movies that I watched as a
child up until today. There are many
different characters and people that I have admired and it is because of those
people that I have the view of the hero that I have today. Then I looked outward at the different heroes
that society has today, noting how different each hero is from another. I interviewed a few of my peers to discover
who they thought of as a hero and what the qualities were that they admired in
that person. All of these led me to
discover that there are so many different definitions of a hero and examples
that vary from person to person. The
term hero is applied to such a broad range of people from sports icons, to
nuns, to presidents, and to soldiers.
After
discovering the huge range in types of hero figures, I then turned to the
expert on heroes, Joseph Campbell. With
his definition of the hero it was possible for me to zero in on a difference
between a hero and a celebrity. The hero
sacrifices to gain his fame; the celebrity does not. It all comes down to that one crucial difference. A celebrity can go through journeys and
changes like the hero, but unless he decides to sacrifice selflessly, he is not
considered a hero.
With that important
element of the hero as the focus, then it is important to be aware of who you
are calling a hero and what you focus on as the difference between a hero and a
celebrity. Why? Because we need heroes.
Society needs those figures to look up to, who are willing to put others above
themselves. If all society looks up to
are celebrity figures who are inspirational but haven’t sacrificed for the good
of society, then we won’t understand this crucial part of human existence. It often takes sacrifice to overcome
situations. If we don’t have anyone to
look up to who have sacrificed then we won’t know how to do it. That is why the hero is crucial, and that is
why it is important to apply that term only to the people who deserve it.
I hope you
enjoy the video. If it doesn’t
accomplish anything else than cause you to pause and think about who you
consider to be a hero and why, then I have accomplished my goal. I simply want to provoke you and give you a
little push into a direction that I think is worth checking out.
Cheers!
