Don't Be a Hero

When I lived in Japan, I did a weekend homestay once with a family whose mother had gone to college in Canada. We were talking about differences in U.S. and Japanese culture one evening when she pointed out something that I had never paid attention to before -- how obsessed U.S. culture is with the idea of heroes.

If you look at the stories we tell ourselves, you'll see over and over again the tale of the ordinary citizen who becomes a hero. He's just a regular guy until circumstance forces him to step up and shoulder a burden too great for him to bear. So romantic! Or, a more recent incarnation of this obsession, the morally questionable anti-hero who manages to win our affection with a single act of heroic self-sacrifice.

And I think that may be the thing that I find most troubling about this part of our culture -- how in love we are with this idea of redeeming our otherwise messy lives by doing great deeds, making great sacrifices, or accomplishing the impossible. We are all ordinary people waiting around for our chance to rise above, to become that special sort of other that is the Hero.

But isn't that conception of our lives ultimately dehumanizing?

One of the beautiful lessons John Green's novel The Fault in Our Stars hopes to teach its readers is that a life devoid of great deeds, devoid of distinguished achievements, devoid of fame or fortune, can still be a well-lived life. All those moments of our lives when we are not committing great acts of heroism are also meaningful. In fact, those moments make up the vast majority of the minutes, hours, days and weeks of human existence. Most of us will be remembered but briefly, if at all. And even those who achieve that exalted Heroic status, how long will their names be remembered? A hundred years? A thousand? How long before the grinding progress of human development effaces even those names from our records?

Today, June 6, you will see message after message calling you to remember the heroic sacrifices made by those who participated in the D-Day invasions. We will attempt to memorialize those people by placing them in the most glorious category we can conceive of: Hero. We separate them out from us, surround them with this glow of more-than-humanity. That sort of admiration has its place. It has its place.

What I would like to suggest is that today we also spare some time to remember all the moments of their lives and ours that were not spent in heroism. All the ordinary moments that are the real stuff of human existence. Those moments were significant to them and to their loved ones, likely far more significant than the few hours they spent fighting and dying on the beaches of Normandy.

In our own lives as well, those moments are unbelievably significant. The moments you spent typing a text message to a friend. The moments you spent staring off into space, daydreaming. The moments you spent humming that stupid song you can't get out of your head -- all the component parts of human consciousness -- those moments are your life too, and not a single one of them is wasted.