Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. Martin Luther King Jr.
Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. Desmond Tutu
Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that such knowledge will help set you free. Assata Shakur
I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel. Florence Nightingale
Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces “nice” people, not heroes. Peter Kreeft
Heroes aren’t heroes because they worship the light, but because they know the darkness all too well to stand down and live with it. Ninya Tippett
I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not. Philip K. Dick
Perseverance is the act of true role models and heroes. Liza Wiemer
I don’t often remember where I was as key events in our world unfolded, but I do remember what I was feeling on the day that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
I grew up with guns in the home, but also in a home which valued gun safety, which would go to great lengths to ensure that guns were always managed responsibly, were never used in anger or to settle scores. The thought that someone would use weapons to “hunt” other humans, let alone a human of King’s stature and hopeful values was almost unfathomable.
Moreover, the killing underscored what for me was a common emotional dimension – a feeling that the world was spinning out of control and that I was impotent in the face of its challenges. It was clear that some people were finding their “refusals,” both quiet and loud – the march across the Selma bridge, the encampments outside courts of law if not justice, the determination to sit in any open seat on public transit and not only those which local legislation had assigned. But such refusals were then beyond my remit. I was a spectator to the upheaval but not in any way a participant in its resolution. I was despondent, angry, unsure of most things, and with so much more to learn than I ever recognized.
On this annual King Day, alongside the recent sad death of Desmond Tutu and the ageing out of some of my most important life guides inside and outside the UN, it seems to be a propitious moment to revisit the entire concept of heroism and heroic acts. Who are our heroes? Why do we have them or need them? What role do they serve in our lives and how are their words and images manipulated and often “domesticated” by others to serve interests inconsistent with their values and efforts to persevere in their commitment to justice through challenge and even threat?
At their best, our heroes provide a modicum of inspiration to those who would deign to follow in their more “famous” and widely-honored footsteps. To insist on a life full of meaning as well as data. To develop and use our voices to keep alive the many and diverse things that matter to ourselves and others. To pay attention and contribute to the local contexts and dimensions of social change. To make a better effort to ensure that those who have been culturally marginalized are brought closer to the center. To counter the darkness which stubbornly resides both in the hearts of ourselves and amidst our communities as one of many contributions to the unfolding of the light.
But there are dangers lurking here as well, the vicarious dimensions of the ways in which we “honor” heroes that serve to impede as much as inspire. Our heroes, in this scenario, are akin to celebrities who do something real (as a schoolchild allegedly confessed to a teacher). But the “real” that they do often falls into the category of things we would not risk doing ourselves – jeopardizing personal and family security to call out injustice, driving into danger to rescue civilians under attack or to feed those at the very edge of starvation, acquiring positions of power and then actually using them to advance the full human condition rather than satisfying personal or even national ambitions, abandoning socially prescribed expectations to serve those who might then serve others, paying forward what has been given to those who need it still.
I have had the life privilege of engaging with several notable figures, including the Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr., who struggled routinely with an often-thoughtless vicariousness, finding themselves often out on a proverbial limb to cheers from an audience that wouldn’t think of joining them there. I am anything but a hero, but I have also been told by others how reassuring it is to know that there is “someone out there doing these things.” As though it is possible to “do these things,” indeed to do much of anything of value at all, without the active engagement, energy, wisdom, even love of so many others. As though the heroic acts of heroic individuals can ever compensate for a dearth of hopeful activity at personal and community level, activity that can transform “the daily grind of domestic affairs” into viable and actionable linkages with so others in familiar and unfamiliar circumstances, including our heroes-turned-celebrities living lives (past or present) which too many of us have sadly become accustomed to assuming have little or nothing to do with our own.
One of the terms which has found growing resonance around the UN community, and which I believe was introduced to me and my office colleagues by Marta Benavides of El Salvador, is that of “accompaniment.” The skills which are conveyed through this term are not in opposition to heroism but are sustainably complementary. Walking alongside rather than in front of. Ensuring a reliable presence beyond one-off events or interventions. Making promises to which we are personally accountable. Remaining attentive to the creeping darkness in our midst and then enacting those “quiet refusals” which standing-down such darkness requires. Setting better examples ourselves rather than pointing to examples of heroes whose often-exemplary lives we might well honor but remain largely out of reach.
At the end of the day, heroism for most of us is not an office to hold or specific actions to honor so much as an opportunity to express our full humanity, a chance to grow beyond our limited contexts, a chance to help incarnate values in the world that we care about but don’t experience sufficiently, a chance to push ourselves further out of the realm of the safe and comfortable into the ever-whirling, ever-maddening, ever-threatened world. Indeed, it is often an important dimension of heroism to focus less on the length of our lives and more on their quality – who they touch, what they stand for, what we can help others to accomplish or, in the case of children, prepare to accomplish.
On this M.L. King Day as on every day, let us pledge to do all the good that we are able, to identify and cast aside the darkness around and within us, to affirm more of life tomorrow than yesterday, and to insist on linking our own accompaniments and other manifestations of justice and service to those of others. These are aspects of heroism, of a life mindfully lived, that do not require celebrity but only a reaffirmation of the fully human, the willingness of all to contribute the good as they are able, goodness which, in tandem, retains the welcome and transformational capacity to “overwhelm the world.”
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