You see them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram- the person that stood up to someone, held the door open, gave someone else a free cup of coffee, or something to that effect. Do they have a lasting impact? No, probably not. You probably won’t remember the name on the article or meme you saw. The person who did the heroing? Also no. The person that had the nice thing done for them? Ah, now we are getting somewhere. Now those people have something to look at, as far as being a hero is concerned.
It’s not even hard to become someone’s hero this way. A homeless person is hanging outside the grocery store, and you hand them a couple of dollars to get some food. You open a door for an old lady, that kind of thing. (You can read a ton of these stories here on Facebook.) You don’t think about it as the hero, it is simply you being nice, spending the three seconds to think of going slightly out of your path to be nice to that person, whither or not you think there is a reward for it. On the other hand, the person that was was on the receiving end will often be exceptionally happy that the thing happened, even posting about it on social media.
Many, many people consider their parents as heroes, myself included, for the trying times that those folks went through while raising them. My own parents went through a period where each lived on either side of the country, my dad raising me and my sister in California, while my mom was going to school in Virginia.
Other parents have similar stories: single moms figuring out how to feed their kids, dads working their asses off in order to pay the bills, or non-binary persons trying to raise their their children in addition to the difficulties involved with their lives. Parents define an important part of everyone’s lives, and should be seen as heroes.
Blog of Heroes 