Real heroes

We hear about heroes all the time. My daughter Bailey is obsessed with Optimus Prime from Transformers. She calls him her hero. She’s five, so that’s pretty logical. I have had many heroes in my life. Some deserving of that title, some, not so much. We hear talk of sports figures as heroes. The news will call any celebrity a hero if they do something good for the community, or the world.

Real heroes though are different. They are not super powered individuals. They aren’t just the mutli-millionaire celebrity who gives away a certain amount of money every year. They are normal, every day people, who happen to do something that helps someone in that moment. Or at least that’s what a hero is to me.

Yesterday, there was a shooting outside of a middle school in the greater Denver area. A crazed man showed up outside of the school as kids were leaving, with a high powered rifle and shot two innocent kids. (One is in critical condition, the other was treated and released.) A math teacher attacked him. Wrestled the gun away from him and held him down until the police arrived. He saved who knows how many kids lives yesterday, just by reacting in the moment. His name is David Benke. He is a middle school math teacher. He is a hero.

Last year, Chesley Sullenberger, landed a freaking plane in the Hudson. A plane full of people. On the Hudson. Everyone remembers his name. Or at least they remember the name, Hudson Hero. Here is the thing that I remember from all of the press he got last year. In every interview, he said, I was just going on instinct. I was doing what I needed to do, without giving it any though. He saved, what a hundred people that day? He was just a pilot doing what he needed to do in the moment. But he’s a hero. Every time I get on a plane, possibly for the rest of my life, I will tell myself that he is the pilot. Even though I know it isn’t true, just thinking it gives me hope, makes me feel safer. That’s what a hero does.

My grandfather built a woman and children’s shelter for battered women back in the early 90’s. He saw a need, he had the resources, so he had it built. It’s an amazing, beautiful building. He never talked about it after it was done. He wouldn’t let anyone put it on a list of his accomplishments. He had a long list, trust me on this. But he’d never add that one. A few years ago, I asked him why he didn’t want anyone to know about that. He told me that it wasn’t that he didn’t want anyone to know, it was that he just hadn’t done it for that. He did it for the women and children that weren’t protected. He said it was one of the few completely selfless things he’d ever done in his life and he wanted it to stay pure and innocent. He wanted to be able to think about that as one of his greatest accomplishments in life, as he died. His thing, the thing he did right in this world. My grandfather? Was a hero.

He was my hero for the majority of my life. For a million reasons that don’t matter. For small things, for big things, for being the man that he was. He’s been dead for almost a year and a half and I’ve yet to find a new hero. Maybe he was enough. Maybe he can still be my hero in death. I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that one.

Real heroes aren’t created. They aren’t made. They become that way in the eyes of someone, generally by accident. For doing something out of the ordinary, for doing something ordinary. It doesn’t really matter which.

So…who is your hero? Who was your hero as a kid?