So you think you are a hero?

In our society everyone wants to be a hero; everyone wants to have a hero.  We go around searching for this so called hero but are we looking in the right place? During class this month we have looked at two kinds of heroes: an epic hero, Beowulf, and a classical hero, Oedipus.  Beowulf is big and strong; he is brave and risks his life for human kind going off to fight dragons and monsters.  Now this kind of hero can not possibly exist in this society.  A single man (or woman, but women normally are not heroes in our society) can not go out on his own hunting down monsters.  Maybe if he is a policeman he can catch criminals, but still, that is a force of people not a single person.  Oedipus is a classical hero; in my opinion, I think he is a hero because he took it upon himself to find Laius' murderer not for himself but to better the city.  Then when he finds out the murderer is himself he does not shy away from the punishment but takes it and this shows mental strength that many do not possess.  I think that many would have trouble thinking of Oedipus as a hero because they do not appreciate mental strength.  Superheroes are always super strong, they can fly, or they shoot lasers with their eyes.  There is not a hero that can take a lot of mental abuse and still have self-confidence.  There is not a hero that fights bullies with wit and not violence.  All of our heroes fight and use physical forces to overcome great odds.  Society does not want to read about, or watch a movie about, someone that uses their keenness to combat a bad person.  People love violence and exciting chases and physical displays.  This is what superheroes give to our society.  This is what people want and that is why heroes are so hard to find.  Not because they do not exist but because we are looking in the wrong place.

September Blog

In all three of the summer reading books The Power of One, The Fountainhead, and the Invisible Man segregation and bias were present.  In The Power of One Peekay is a white boy in an African area.  In The Fountainhead Roark designs buildings that were shunned by architects.  In The Invisible Man, the IM is a black man trying to fit into a white society.  In two of these novels the segregation springs from skin color and racism.  Peekay was made fun of and abused because he was white.  The IM was used because they thought he was smart for a black man.  In my Psychology class we watched a program that was done by Oprah.  Everyone in her audience was convinced of the fact that people with blue eyes were not as smart as those with brown eyes.  People believed this easily.  The people with blue eyes were offended that they were not being treated fairly.  After they found out it was an experience and not a true fact, a few of the people with blue eyes claimed they now knew what it was like to be a black person in America.  Now I have to say, I do not know what it is like to be discriminated against (not to that degree anyway.) I think that you can never understand unless you live in that situation every day.  These books and this experience that Oprah did are ways to get a glance at what it feels like to live the life of a discriminated person.  I find it interesting that these two classes were parallel in their teachings.