Finding Our Heroes in the Right Places

It's dangerous to have heroes.

In the eulogy that Nike Chairman Phil Knight delivered at Joe Paterno's funeral in the shadow of the Penn State sexual abuse scandal, Knight spoke eloquently about Paterno - notwithstanding the cloud surrounding his dismissal and firing - had been his hero for some time and was still his hero. Here's an excerpt from that eulogy:

I am a man who has always needed heroes. It started when I was a boy and I never outgrew it. It has, I'm sure, something to do with how I decided to make my living. A decade and a half ago an Esquire magazine reporter asked the question, "Who is your hero?" My answer was simple: my college track coach and partner, Bill Bowerman. He had won four national championships, coached more sub four minute milers than anyone when he retired. He insisted he was not a track coach. He was a professor of competitive response. One year at the University of Oregon, the only group that had a higher grade point average than the track team was a fraternity. He said do right and fear no man. When he died on Christmas Eve in 1999, I asked myself, "What do I do for a hero now?" Two months later on the Nike trip, the answer showed itself across the table wearing a thick set of eyeglasses. I said, "I'm not asking your permission, I'm just telling you, I need someone to look up to. You're my new hero." 

Why do people need heroes? I completely understand that there's value in having someone in the flesh to emulate, someone who personifies all of the virtues which you aspire to. It's one thing to say, be generous, kid and good, but what always seems to be most difficult is assessing what that actually looks like. Heroes serve to be those walking and talking of examples of those virtues, taking all of the guesswork out of what it means to have good character.

Interestingly, television has been one of the great tools of the trade when it comes to harvesting heroes. Gen-Xers like myself were jaded and cynical enough to eliminate traditional candidates (public officials, politicians, athletes) for hero-designation. Instead, we found comfort in two-dimensional television archetypes to be our role models. In some ways, that made sense because it gave a nod at the fallibility of every human being, and that only on television could someone be blameless. For that challenging endeavor of being a good father, we tapped into characters such as Steven Keaton, Jason Seaver and on classic re-runs, Mike Brady. But nobody was held as the quintessential "good dad" as much as Cliff Huxtable from "The Cosby Show".

Here's the funny thing - people began to see Bill Cosby as being interchangeable with Cliff Huxtable. In some ways, Cosby was responsible for that. For example, the show wasn't "The Huxtables", so Cosby himself seemed to welcome the melding of his on-screen persona with himself. In the same way, Cosby often toured as a one-man show, and would regale audiences with observational comedy around life and fatherhood, very much in the same way that Cliff Huxtable did on the television show. And all of his schtick was wholesome and American as apple pie. People of all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds were thrilled that in a society and world which increasingly saw the breakdown of the family, Bill, er, Cliff was still there demonstrating good parenthood with a slide of humor.

Flash forward to present day. and allegations of sexual abuse are flying around Bill Cosby's misdeeds. What's been interesting to me is to see the diversity of reactions to the charges. Some are outraged, furious that in this season of renewed awareness of the horrors of sexual abuse that another man was caught behaving badly. Others are shocked that someone who had otherwise been such a positive role model could have made such a terrible series of a mistake. Some are skeptical, wondering aloud why these allegations surfaced suddenly in a wave after being dormant so long. For many, it's a combination of the above emotions. For many, the overwhelming feeling is one of sadness, recognizing that someone just isn't who we thought or wished they were.

Going back to my original point, having heroes can be dangerous. If having heroes means that we leave no room for moral failure, we're inevitably going to encounter a harsh lesson in reality. If having heroes means that their moral failure has the power to make one question the fundamental goodness of mankind, then we're opening the doors to waves of cynicism. There isn't anyone, outside of God Himself, who can or should bear that level of moral scrutiny.

Or maybe we need to redefine what heroes are. Maybe the better approach towards heroes is recognizing that we're all broken people, with some of us muddling through, barely held together with scotch tape better than others. Every human being has opportunities each day to do something worthy of a being a hero. I believe that acts of heroism occur each day by people in our homes, our neighborhoods, our work and our schools. At least for me, those are the heroes that I find most inspiring and impactful.