It's been a tough week for bravery.
I did something kind of dumb a few years ago. I changed the way that I personally defined heroism. I don't remember why. I think there was some news story about a neighbor calling the fire department and being labeled a hero without doing so much as putting on his shoes. And I was probably in one of those moods.
What I came up with was the opinion that the term 'hero' should be reserved for someone who moved willfully from a place of safety to be in bodily danger solely for the benefit of someone else. Bonus points if that person was a stranger.
I was super proud of this. I imagined an x/y axis, intersecting continua of personal danger and external benefit, on which a self-assured, external judge (me, for example) could objectively rate and compare heroic acts and see how they stack up in the ol'... I don't know... Shmerp-O-Meter.
The problems with the criteria were hard to spot until I applied them to (take a deep breath, this is not going to feel good) flight 93.
The passengers of flight 93 didn't move willfully from safety to danger. And their actions were based, in part, on self-preservation. Using the criteria of my system, which seemed so promising early on, these people could not be classified as heroic. To make matters worse -- so very much worse that it hurts to think about it -- the same criteria that robbed the passengers of heroic status kind of (kiiind of) bestows it on the terrorists. Kind of.
I quickly abandoned this idea.
The lesson? I learned not to reach out from here, the center of my comfortable, fairly mainstream life where I've never been shot at or threatened, or had to struggle to convince anyone that I was entitled to equality, to draw lines around other people's courage.
Heroism should probably remain a subjective, emotionally-defined quality, which means that I can't really bust on the people who posted and clicked and shared images of wounded vets with captions that suggest that some dichotomy exists between our troops and a transgender reality TV personality.
I really want to, though. Because appropriating those images is a misuse of someone else's valor.
Imagine asking a wounded soldier to allow their image to be used to punish the honesty of someone trying to be a positive example to a small, misunderstood, disenfranchised slice of humanity. Takers? Maybe a few. But my bet is that it wouldn't be many.
So, if you posted one of these things, I understand that you feel oogie about certain regions of the sexual spectrum. And I won't ask or expect you to change their mind. Gender reassignment is a weird, jarring thing that makes a lot of people uncomfortable and causes them to question why any right thinking person would want to subject themselves to it. I feel exactly the same way about high school wrestling.
Instead, I'd ask you to pause and reflect briefly on two bits of irony.
Firstly, the pictured soldiers were wounded in the service of a country which purports to celebrate the rights and dignity of the individual. Remember going to war under the guise of liberating the oppressed? In part? At first? Yeah, well this is sort of where we put that into practice.
Secondly, no one would even whisper the word 'bravery' in the context of gender reassignment if this country wasn't full of people who leap at the chance to denigrate a guy who was honest about wanting to become a woman. It's perfectly fine to be sick and tired of hearing about Caitlin Jenner, but they're not really saying something nice about her about her when they call her brave. They're saying something very harsh about you.
In thirty years, when Michael Phelps decides to transition into the gooniest woman alive*, it would be nice to be living in a world where it's not news. You can make that happen by not ranking something as valuable as human bravery like it was a goddamned diving competition.
You don't have to be tolerant, you don't have to reevaluate your relationship with this changing society, you don't have to be silent. Just leave room for dignity on every side.
By the way, if you yourself are a soldier who was wounded in any way, down to and including sunburn, and you post your own picture, I have no argument. Thank you for your service.
*Yeah. I said 'when'.
I did something kind of dumb a few years ago. I changed the way that I personally defined heroism. I don't remember why. I think there was some news story about a neighbor calling the fire department and being labeled a hero without doing so much as putting on his shoes. And I was probably in one of those moods.
What I came up with was the opinion that the term 'hero' should be reserved for someone who moved willfully from a place of safety to be in bodily danger solely for the benefit of someone else. Bonus points if that person was a stranger.
I was super proud of this. I imagined an x/y axis, intersecting continua of personal danger and external benefit, on which a self-assured, external judge (me, for example) could objectively rate and compare heroic acts and see how they stack up in the ol'... I don't know... Shmerp-O-Meter.
The problems with the criteria were hard to spot until I applied them to (take a deep breath, this is not going to feel good) flight 93.
The passengers of flight 93 didn't move willfully from safety to danger. And their actions were based, in part, on self-preservation. Using the criteria of my system, which seemed so promising early on, these people could not be classified as heroic. To make matters worse -- so very much worse that it hurts to think about it -- the same criteria that robbed the passengers of heroic status kind of (kiiind of) bestows it on the terrorists. Kind of.
I quickly abandoned this idea.
The lesson? I learned not to reach out from here, the center of my comfortable, fairly mainstream life where I've never been shot at or threatened, or had to struggle to convince anyone that I was entitled to equality, to draw lines around other people's courage.
Heroism should probably remain a subjective, emotionally-defined quality, which means that I can't really bust on the people who posted and clicked and shared images of wounded vets with captions that suggest that some dichotomy exists between our troops and a transgender reality TV personality.
I really want to, though. Because appropriating those images is a misuse of someone else's valor.
Imagine asking a wounded soldier to allow their image to be used to punish the honesty of someone trying to be a positive example to a small, misunderstood, disenfranchised slice of humanity. Takers? Maybe a few. But my bet is that it wouldn't be many.
So, if you posted one of these things, I understand that you feel oogie about certain regions of the sexual spectrum. And I won't ask or expect you to change their mind. Gender reassignment is a weird, jarring thing that makes a lot of people uncomfortable and causes them to question why any right thinking person would want to subject themselves to it. I feel exactly the same way about high school wrestling.
Instead, I'd ask you to pause and reflect briefly on two bits of irony.
Firstly, the pictured soldiers were wounded in the service of a country which purports to celebrate the rights and dignity of the individual. Remember going to war under the guise of liberating the oppressed? In part? At first? Yeah, well this is sort of where we put that into practice.
Secondly, no one would even whisper the word 'bravery' in the context of gender reassignment if this country wasn't full of people who leap at the chance to denigrate a guy who was honest about wanting to become a woman. It's perfectly fine to be sick and tired of hearing about Caitlin Jenner, but they're not really saying something nice about her about her when they call her brave. They're saying something very harsh about you.
In thirty years, when Michael Phelps decides to transition into the gooniest woman alive*, it would be nice to be living in a world where it's not news. You can make that happen by not ranking something as valuable as human bravery like it was a goddamned diving competition.
You don't have to be tolerant, you don't have to reevaluate your relationship with this changing society, you don't have to be silent. Just leave room for dignity on every side.
By the way, if you yourself are a soldier who was wounded in any way, down to and including sunburn, and you post your own picture, I have no argument. Thank you for your service.
*Yeah. I said 'when'.
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