This is a collection of short life profiles of people that I personally find to be interesting and inspiring. I struggled many days trying to come up with an appropiate name for this section. Failing to find a better option, I finally decided to call it HEROES, not necesarily because these persons did heroic actions, but mostly because I admire them and consider them my personal heroes. Having said that, I feel the need to explain my concerns regarding the use (or misuse) of the word hero.

 

The word hero is nowadays promiscuously overused, to the extent that its meaning has lost all of its original sense. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a hero is “a person who is admired by many people for doing something brave or good”. Fair enough, that is a very general and wide definition. The problem comes when pretty much anybody is a hero at some point in his/her life. If everybody is a hero, then why is that person admired if he/she is not that special at all?

 

Allow me to demonstrate this point with a simple example. Check your local newspaper and the odds are that you will find a story in the lines of “local hero returns lost boy in shopping center to his parents”, or “sexy fireman rescues cat from evil tree”, or “local doctor saves the life of man choking in barbecue”. You get the point. The thing is that none of these people were doing anything extraordinary. They were just doing their job or acting like any responsible citizen would act. I mean, what am I supposed to do if a kid asks me to help him finding his parents in a shopping center? Or if I see a desperate-looking octogenarian watching her cat trapped in the upper branches of a tree? Or if the slightly overweight fellow seated next to me starts to choke with a piece of meat in his throat? Am I supposed to ignore them? I don’t think so.

 

Which brings us to another common misuse of the word hero: when we call hero a person that in reality is a victim. Let me give you a pretty well known example of this. Do you remember when 33 Chilean miners got trapped 700 m underground, and subsequently rescued alive back in 2010? Well, these miners were called heroes worldwide, they were in TV shows everywhere, they gave speeches, documentaries were done, books were written and even a Hollywood film was made about the episode. But few people at the time saw them as what they really were: victims. Victims of their employer, victims of years of safety failures in the mine where they worked, victims of unregulated mining practices, victims of inadequate laws concerning workers safety, victims of the capitalist economy. And the saddest thing is that after their 15 minutes of fame, they all ended as poor as before, with PTSD, some of them alcoholic, depressed, and deeply disappointed of the government and society.

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I guess the root of the problem of the misuse of the word hero is the celebrity-worshipping culture of our days. We are constantly looking for people to follow and imitate. And this is exacerbated by the vertiginous flow of information that social media and the internet provide. And the truth we fail to see is that all heroes are celebrities (worth to celebrate) but not all celebrities are heroes. Specially nowadays when everybody is a celebrity at some point. The fact of the matter is that, in my view, a hero is a person that in ordinary circumstances acts extraordinarily. But what we usually celebrate as a hero is persons that in extraordinary circumstances act ordinarily.

 

Therefore, the people in the following list is mostly people that raised from the mundanity of their surroundings to become extraordinary persons that did extraordinary things admirable by many. Heroes. And just as a small disclaimer, many, if not all of my heroes, did or say some things that might not be morally accepted today, or might not have been morally accepted even back then when they lived. That is just fine. They are all just human beings after all. And this is just my own particular, subjective, non-exhaustive and all too human selection of historical figures. A collection of personal heroes.