What makes a hero?
There are lots of different opinions, of course. But there would probably be agreement that a hero:
- has to have done something really important, or something considered to be important (though judgements on what is important will vary!)
- has to have done something which has benifitted other people in some way - but does it have to have benefited a significant number of people? And what sort of benefit? Is a star football player who brings benefit to his teams supporters a hero? Or do you have to discover penicillin and benefit all mankind?
- what they have done has to be widely known, reported and remembered over time. Put bluntly, a hero needs good PR - or at the very least, somebody somewhere has to be aware of what they have done - even unsung heroes have to be sung about a little bit somewhere. There is of course a major issue over whether the publicity creates the hero in some cases, rather than just reporting and enabling the hero to be recognised. This is not only a contemporary issue - whether your publicity is through bardic poetry at the court of a medieval prince or Hello magazine doesn't actually make a lot of difference.
There is also another issue. To achieve hero status:
- Do they have to be dead? Obviously room for debate here - can we really judge someone's importance while they are still alive? Do we need to be able to use the distance of time to stand back a little? In fact, can it be argued that if you are dead you are a hero, if alive, a celebrity?