It has obviously become apparent that people have forgotten what a hero is. In my opinion, a hero is one who does the most heroic thing a person could do which is put your life in mortal danger to save someone else. But apparently people like to throw around that term to get closure upon death.
I was watching the news and heard people calling the Astronauts on the once mighty Columbia “heroes”. This sort of boggled my superior mind because according to my theory, they were not heroes. More so, they were pioneers per say. They didn’t save the world directly; their contributions to mankind were generous and highly respectable and I do indeed admire them. However to go as far as to call them heroes? That seems to be a big reach.
If you consider them heroes, then by definition along the same lines, bakers are heroes too. No, I am not talking about our good friend Adolf, I’m talking about the local neighborhood baker who brings you such amazing products like bread and the fantastapotimus™ black and white cookie. A baker helps the world. People need bread products. The astronauts gathered information and brought it back to earth. So that means that college and professional scouts are heroes too, for that is what they do. Except they do not loose radio contact and blow up over Texas.
It takes away credit from real heroes like firemen and policemen. They put their lives on the line for people they do not even know. People whom they never met before but choose to for a living to save these people from imminent doom and possible death. These people are the heroes, not the astronauts.
I know the other side of the coin; “they were doing something that not that many other people have ever done, they’re heroes”. To that I say this; Yo Banana Licker, Role-Model, not hero.” People do admire the astronauts and the bakers of this world, however they did not put their lives in danger to save another or society. They did not do any superhuman strength or will.
All in all it was indeed a disaster and I feel really bad in what has happened. I have a lot of faith in NASA and believe that this will never happen again. To call this a disaster is understandable, but a tragedy, I’ll let you figure that out, here is Aristotle’s definition of a tragedy.
“According to Aristotle the tragic hero evokes our pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly evil but a mixture of both. The tragic effect is stronger if the hero is more moral than we are. The tragic hero suffers a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of a mistaken act which he performs due to his hamartia-'error of judgment'- one form of hamartia is hubris-'pride' which leads the tragic hero to ignore or violate a divine warning or moral law. The tragic hero evokes our pity because he is not evil and his misfortune is greater than he deserves, and he evokes our fear because we realize we are fallible and could make the same error. It would appear from Aristotle's definition that Oedipus could be described as a tragic hero.”
