I recently had an interview with one of my professors, Bernard Richter. A PhD in comparative literature, I figured he would be a good expert on the topic of heroes. I asked him a handful of questions, like who his heroes were, and some more esoteric questions on heroes in general.
My first question was very simple- who was his hero? His response was rather personal, far more personal than I expected. A few years ago, his twenty two month old daughter had developed a tumor that was in her liver. He was holding her at one point and felt it, and had a sinking feeling. After some tests were run, the horrifying was proven: she had cancer.
Throughout the process, and even into the surgery itself, Doctors Dutta and Rangaswami, along with a small army of other doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, and other positions that I don’t know, helped Richter and his partner get through the trying times of getting a child through cancer. It all worked out- she is happy and healthy now, and would not have been without those doctors. If you want more information on these doctors, or the program they are part of at Stanford, you can check out a link to their site here.
Moving on from that, we also discussed something a little closer to the blog itself- the difference between hero and protagonist, and how that is an important distinction. For example- many people would argue with the idea that a character like Deadpool would be a plain hero, but he is definitely the protagonist of his story.
Lastly, one topic that stuck in my mind is that as someone gets more educated, more intellectual, the fewer heroes a person has, and vice versa, the more spiritual a person gets, the more likely that they have a larger number of heroes.
For example- I had a English teacher who was a on the spiritual side, and saw Martin Luther King Jr. as a hero to them. On the one hand, he was very, very important to the civil rights movement, and was instrumental for black persons to get the right to vote. On the other hand, he slept around, abused his wife, and wasn’t a particularly great father.
This is not to say that Martin Luther King Jr. is not a hero- far from it. But other non-racist persons don’t necessarily see him as a hero due to these character flaws.
Blog of Heroes 