100. New Heroes

Last night I explained to my grandsons that wealth had not always reigned supreme, and money had not always been the largest motivator in our society—or in the larger world. That there were times when fame was pursued, or glory in battle, or self-sufficiency on a homestead. There were times and places in history when religion was ascendent, when young men and women aspired to be Catholic and Shintu priests, Protestant reformers and Buddhist nuns. 

 

Thor Heyerdahl and his crew sailed a balsawood raft across an ocean to show another possible past; Lindberg and Earhart flew to show it could be done; Jackie Robinson endured taunts and threats to open a baseball way for his black brothers; Martin Luther King sensed his own death but kept on for a greater cause. 

 

Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio took time away from baseball careers to fight in a war—two wars for Williams, a fighter pilot who became an ACE in Korea in what might have been the golden years of his baseball career. In those days, in WWs I and II and into Korea, Congressmen watched their sons enlist or be drafted, and enlisted themselves. There was some sense of shared national responsibility that crumbled with Vietnam and the all-volunteer military. 

 

When I was young in small-town Minnesota the doctor didn’t have the biggest house or car; we knew he made house-calls and worked long hours, admired him for what he did. He carried more prestige than did the car dealer with a big boat and cabin at the lake.

 

I was blessed to come of age when John Kennedy was President and imagined a better world, imagined a “Peace Corps” of young Americans—men and women who would travel, help and learn. We got travel, training, and health care, an in-country “living allowance” ($50/month in my case), and $75 each month put away to “readjust,” or pay off student loans after we finished our two-year hitches. 

 

We weren’t smarter or better than young men and women today, and neither were Thor Heyerdahl or Ted Williams. Their times and ours did not have everything right—the troops were still segregated through WW II, and black soldiers came home to discrimination and lynchings; Japanese citizens were put in camps during that war; my own time and people still shoved women to the back, had them make the coffee. And although we marched for Civil Rights and against war, we literally did not see the American Indians in our midst, did not notice how we white Americans unconsciously elevated ourselves above Mexican and Asian Americans.

 

But sometime about 1980, with Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a confluence of anti-government sentiments from right and left (fewer regulations; “no more wars”), the influence of Ayn Rand’s blockbuster libertarian novels (Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged), and the thirst for “self” that busted Major League contracts and weakened unions—all conspired to make individual achievement—and pleasure—measured and facilitated by wealth, the new American gospel.

 

It’s had its 40 years, and this gospel too is weakening, as did the religious fervor that drove Christians to missionize in Africa and on Indian reservations here, the rush to glory that drove troops to our bloodiest—and Civil—war, the solemn collective volunteerism that showed lines of men each week in the Wallowa County Chieftain as they reported for duty, ready to ship to Europe or the Pacific, unaware really of where “over there” really was in 1918 or 1942. 

 

I hope wealth’s run its course. I have nothing against money or wealth; they’ve done good work from time to time, are today if you count Bill and Melinda Gates’ work with polio, the ongoing work of Carnegie and Rockefeller endowments. I know that there will always be some with more, others with less. But money and wealth can’t hold a candle to fairness and justice, health and wellness. They’re no guarantee against illness and heartbreak—and in the end there is always death. 

 

The pandemic and Black Lives Matter—and now the Atlanta killings—have laid things bare. Can we use their lessons to chart new courses, choose new values, define new dreams, find new heroes?  

 

For heroes I’ll take the great peacemakers—Gandhi, King, Mandela—and those who paved the way, and their acolytes who tried to carry on—Jackie Robinson, John Lewis, and the South African Springboks rugby team. I’ll take the songwriters and poets of peace, the unknowns who fashioned “We Shall Overcome,” and Johnny Cash’s “Ballad of Ira Hayes.” The three-initialed—and flawed—presidents, FDR, JFK, and LBJ, who visioned a shared and just humanity.  

 

I’ll take pandemic nurses and Dr. Fauci, Lebron James and his bicycles for Akron, and A’ja Wilson, the young black Las Vegas basketball star, who said of her South Carolina college: “My grandmother couldn't even walk on this campus; she had to walk around [it]. If she was here today to see her granddaughter has a statue where she once could not walk ... it goes to show how you just plant seeds, and that's what it's all about.”

 

# # #