Unwarranted Heroes

In the Unites States over the last 20 or 30 years we have lost the true definition of what a hero is. We see sports stars, politicians, even just some guy or woman we see on tv we consider heroes. For my personal tastes you need look no further than the military, police force, and fire departments to find true heroes that put their lives on the line everyday to make sure that we get to live ours. Naturally there are the everyday people that do remarkable things that deserve praise in just about every profession but we have so blurred the line of what a hero truly is that someone doing the simplest thing (like shoveling someone's drive without having to be asked) is now labeled as a hero.

So much as we have become hero worshipers we see them as our personal friends to the point that when we bring them up in conversations we mention them by first names only. No place do we see that more on display than in sports. We all have our personal favorite teams or sports personalities and when something goes wrong we take it personal as if we were personally involved in it.

Take for instance the escapades of Tiger Woods. He cheated on his wife and reportedly (though not proven) has a sex addiction which is reportedly (again) the reason he is in rehab. When this broke so many people felt they were personally affected by this and it led to the statement that he gave yesterday. Sponsors began dropping him because he had violated some unwritten morality clause with them.

The truth is, Tiger Woods does not owe any of anything, and certainly he does not owe us an apology. The only people he needs to answer to are his family (specifically his wife and mother) and his closest friends.

Having said that I thought he was very contrite and (for once in his life) real with his comments. I hope he comes back to golf sooner rather than later because quite honestly golf is boring without him playing.

We see this all the time with our celebrities and sports stars, because of our hero worshiping, they screw up, and for some odd reason we feel we need an apology from them for what they have done.

The bottom line is that when it comes to sports stars, celebrities, and even politicians they really do not owe us anything. The difference with the politicians is that those that are elected by us, whether it be on the state level, Congress, or President there are things that they do where they will have to apologize to us because they are serving for us, they are our representatives and if they do something stupid and do not make amends for it there is a good chance they will not be re-elected.

There is on exception to these apologies and it is those people (typically politicians who learned a long time ago to talk out of both sides of their mouths) who issue non-apology apologies where all they apologize for is IF someone was offended. It's those apologies that usually are met with the highest amount of scrutiny.

It would be nice if we could watch our movies, sports, and television personalities without putting them on the hero platform but with 24/7 news and something always having to be news it's going to be extremely hard not to hero worship.