For me, it all started with Michelangelo, my very first hero. Not the Renaissance visionary–the teenage mutant ninja turtle. As a child, I spent hours with my pizza shooter truck, cried after every Christmas when my mom packed away my TMNT ornaments, and called things “radical” far more than any four year old should.
Then one summer, I took my first trip to Disney World. My parents took me to a ninja turtle parade, and I was ecstatic. But afterward, they carried me off to meet and greet the turtles. As soon as I was near Mikey, I freaked out. I buried my head in my mom’s legs and cried and refused to go near him. I was terrified.
It only takes a casual spectator at the bar on a Friday night to realize: I haven’t changed much since I was four.
Unfortunately, that’s the way it often is when you make people epic heroes in your mind. They become something overwhelming and almost frightening, because they are almost unrecognizable. Doing this to people is a perfectly natural thing; in fact, we’re raised on a culture of heroes. From Batman to Obama, we’re taught that people can be more than just people from a very young age.
Back then, just being older than us was enough to make someone a hero. Anyone who had boobs was my hero when I was around eleven and all I wanted was boobs. Learning to worship things is one of the earliest lessons of youth as a mechanism to teach us qualities to emulate, whether it’s some idea of “God” or some other person who can substitute for “God.” We have as many gods in our modern culture as the ancient Greeks, but we do have the advantage that most of them don’t impregnate us through the shower. Most.
Idolization really isn’t a safe practice; I’m pretty sure one of the Ten Commandments even says so. It can lead to obsession, which is much more than just letting a person have a positive influence on you and showing your appreciation with a few laminated posters of him. Obsession happens when you start making this person an integral part of who you are and you can’t do anything without asking yourself what he would do. The worst example of this in all of history? Jesus.
Fortunately, most people never really have to come to terms with their unhealthy hero worship and obsession–hey, it’s not like you’re going to meet Jesus on the street. Some people make heroes out of real people in their lives, but for those of us who find that “real” people are often proven to be flawed and disappointing, we choose to idolize people who are more like characters. Whether they wear capes and masks or actually exist on our physical plane (just not in our direct vicinity), we can make them whoever we want them to be and seldom have to deal with the truth.
However, on the rare occasion that your fairly abstract idea of a hero becomes a reality, it can be jarring. I recently got another chance to meet one of my personal ideological heroes, and he wasn’t a cartoon character this time. But the experience was similar, unfortunately. I may not have hid behind my mommy’s legs, but I was still too terrified to fully appreciate it. And then he ran off with a midget.
A lesson to all: the people you worship will always run off with midgets. In a metaphorical sense.
In light of this recent experience, do you know what I’ve realized? Michelangelo was just a guy in a mask. He wasn’t even the person (or mutant) I had idolized. And do you know what else? It’s the same for all my heroes.
People can never be exactly what we want them to be once we start embellishing in our minds in order to make them the heroes we need as an example. People are flawed–it’s the human condition. I’m not saying that the people I’ve chosen as heroes don’t have some heroic qualities. Everyone has some heroic qualities: I once gave a drunk girl who was walking around without shoes a plastic grocery bag, partially because I wanted to watch her hop around with a bag over her feet, but also out of heroism. Anyone is capable of improving another person’s life, and I guess by my definition, that’s heroic. But being heroic doesn’t necessarily make one a hero, just like drinking alcohol excessively doesn’t necessarily make one an alcoholic.
So the question remains: Are there real heroes in the world? I honestly don’t know. And please don’t come attack me, all you firefighters and cops and girls who salivate over them. The thing is, I think they are just people, doing what they can to ensure they die happy. For cops and firefighters, maybe that’s keeping people safe. For some people, maybe that’s sex and beer. It’s all very relative, and I guess we each have to decide for ourselves which qualities to value most. For example, I value tongue dexterity, so some of my heroes have been strangers at parties.
Maybe anyone who does whatever it takes to be happy in his or her own skin, or helps you be happier in your own skin, is some kind of hero. But there are no saviors. My hero was there in my life exactly when I needed him to be, but that’s more happenstance than anything. He didn’t save me. I saved myself. He just pushed me over that edge so that I was finally forced to grab onto something. For me, that made him a hero, but maybe to someone else, it would have made him an antihero.
In spite of some recent disillusionment about hero worship, I do still believe that people are capable of being something more to us than mere compatriot sacks of flesh. People whom I know, and whom I’ll never really know, will always have some role in defining me. I don’t mind being defined by others sometimes. I don’t mind calling them heroes. I don’t think raising them higher makes me lower.
And maybe if I hadn’t been so afraid, Michelangelo would have taken off his mask and we could have actually gotten to know each other. No more being just a hero in a half shell. Although, that’s probably against Disney World regulations.
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