Heroes

Do kids have heroes anymore? When your Center City Correspondent was growing up we all had heroes, whether they were baseball players, actors in westerns, or my favorite, astronauts. It was easy to pick a Richie Ashburn or Mickey Mantle and follow his career, mainly through the newspapers and wish you could achieve what they had. Fan favorites also included Roy Rogers or John Wayne shooting their way through cattle rustlers or Indians. And when I was about 10 they picked the original 7 astronauts for the nascent space program; I knew all about them so when they went into space, I felt I was flying along with them. As you get older, hero worship fades away as you come to realize that they are merely people like everyone else and they have clay feet too. In the current day, it’s harder to have heroes because you find out all too fast that they have their foibles too (ala Tiger Woods). So what’s a kid to do nowadays? Who do they have to look up to – juiced baseball players, basketball players packing heat, tantrum-filled tennis players? You might ask how about our politicians, the ones who run our country? When they are not bamboozling billions from the kitty, they’re flying off to foreign countries for weekend dalliances. Not much choice there.


Last week I realized I still have a hero – someone I can look up to and emulate, and hopefully follow their footsteps, if I’m able. In our book club we recently read a few books about Joan of Arc, my favorite saint. She was a peasant girl in the 15th century who grew up to become the savior of her country; in fact she might be considered the first person to realize that there was a country to be saved. She was very successful at first, but then through political trickery, she was captured, tried as a heretic, and martyred. Her story is fascinating and resonates down through the ages; almost 600 years later we still read and care about her. She truly is a hero for all time. So don’t despair, if you need one there are still some people left that can qualify to be a hero for you. Keep looking; sometimes the journey is more illuminating than the arrival.