Henrietta Hay's Column

In the innocence of my depression generation I asked, "Who was Jerry Garcia?" My ex-hippie friend, a child of the sixties, his language regressing thirty years, replied, "What do you mean, who is Garcia? Only the last best icon of the sixties. I mean like what are all the Deadheads gonna do now, man? What a bummer!" Jerry Garcia is dead."

A few days later perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time died. I did not have to ask who Mick was. I was one of his fans. Mickey Mantle is dead.

A musician and an athlete, both adored by millions of Americans, both dead from years of self-destructive behavior, both labeled by some as heroes.

I am probably too old to understand the Garcia phenomenon, but Patrick Cleary's memories interpret for me. "There, wrapped in the comfort of his musical blanket, we found security, warmth, acceptance and, most importantly, escape from our particular place and predicament."

Mickey Mantle was a superb baseball player in the times when baseball was America's sport. And he was always pictured with that warm, friendly grin on his face. In the fifties I hardly knew there were any other baseball teams out there except the New York Yankees. Little kids loved him, old people loved him -- and so did everybody in between.

By tradition a hero is a man of great strength and courage favored by the Gods and, in fact, usually half-god. Later, much later, the word came to mean mere humans who were especially admired for their great achievements, and especially for courage and exploits in war.

The first and possibly the last true hero in the traditional sense was Hercules. The Greek mythological hero, famous for his courage and strength, chose virtue over pleasure. As his funeral pyre burned he was carried up to Mt. Olympus and became a god.

They don't make 'em like that any more. To paraphrase Pete Seeger's song, "Where have all the heroes gone? Long time passing. Where have all the heroes gone? Long, long ago." They haven't gone away. They've just become human.

Heroes are human beings and they are flawed -- like all the rest of us.

What do we need heroes for anyway? Some experts think that children need heroes in their growing-up years. A long dead sociologist named Charles Cooley wrote that, "If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one's self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life."

The history books are full of "heroes:" Hannibal (although he had lots of help from the elephants), Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, George Washington, Robert E. Lee. Neil Armstrong. Personally I prefer those whose qualifications were "great achievements," like Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Mme. Curie and Susan B. Anthony. Their human flaws were not well known, so their reputations remained intact during their lifetimes.

Today we tend to think of popularity as heroism. Modern communication creates instant recognition of "heroes" and then tears them down by hunting out all their flaws and making them instantly visible to the world. We will never have the old style traditional heroes again. We are too sophisticated and too well informed.

It's time to leave the traditional idea of "Heroes" to the Greeks and the half-Gods whom they worshipped. It is time for a new definition of heroism. Our kids have not lost their heroes after all. They need to know, we all need to know, that heroism is the courage and ability of a human person, warts and all, to respond to the demands of historical moments. When there is a crisis there is usually someone around who is heroic enough to handle it.

Today's heroes, every bit as heroic as any in history, are men and women with human frailties who rise to the needs around them and give a vision to the rest of us. They are the people who change the world. They are the people who touch our hearts.