Heroes Quasi and Real

Repost from 2002 Inspired by Chris Hayes of MSNBC Hero Controversy.
 

Update 6/2/12

Poor Chris Hayes of MSNBC got himself in trouble for suggesting he was "uncomfortable" calling soldiers heroes. I was making this complaint ten years ago generally about all of our uses of "hero."

Recently our nation had another hero similar to the hero mentioned in my article below. He is a roofer from New Jersey. That morning when he woke up to go to work he had no expectation of being in danger or especially of risking his life. It is that fact that makes him a real hero. 51-year-old Rob Nuckols a hero and his news story of heroics:

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February 2002:

A Hero is Discovered in Harlem:

" . . The headlights of the No. 1 train appeared. “I had to make a split decision,” Mr. Autrey said. So he made one, and leapt. Mr. Autrey lay on Mr. Hollopeter, his heart pounding, pressing him down in a space roughly a foot deep. The train’s brakes screeched, but it could not stop in time . . . . "
Read the entire story: 1/2/2007 New York Times

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2011:

Quasi Heroes and Real Heroes

We are getting carried away from important ideas and their English vocabulary definitions, for the sake of feel-good emotional docu-drama. We are calling the wrong people heroes and we are afraid to acknowledge truths to squelch our own collective emotions regarding the September 11^th massacres. Former mayor Gulliani of New York City is not a hero. The firefighters and police or New York City are not heroes. George W. Bush is certainly not a hero.

What is a hero? Is it someone who does his job, or someone who goes beyond his or job and into danger or humility when he doesn’t have to? I say it’s the later. Take for instance the firefighters at the scene of the world trade center massacre; are they heroes for attempting to save lives, forsaking their own lives and going into the scene, either into the buildings to get people out, or toward the catastrophe of rubble to evacuate pedestrians in the disorder of the collapse of the towers? Heroes are the pedestrians and otherwise civilian bystanders who risked their lives to do the same. They were not expected to, yet some did. If heroes are civil servants and rescue personnel who veritably carry on their persons their own resignation papers, for quick turnover to their immediate supervisors in case a situation gets scary, then yes the NYC firefighters and police were heroes for not resigning upon viewing the tragic circumstances of the moment.

A hero is the boy out for a walk who notices a man bobbing up and down in a large ice hole in the middle of a frozen lake. The boy takes off his shoes and coat and jumps in to hoist the man to safety. A hero is the man driving his car on the highway, he sees a burning wreck on the side of the road, he stops, he runs to the vehicle, reaches into the scorching hot car and pulls another driver to safety, saving a life. The boy walking and the man driving are not rescue trained civil servants performing obligations for pay and to meet performance expectations of their peers and supervisors, these hypothetical people are real heroes.

We cheapen the word hero by further exalting this title on people doing what they were expected to do. We make heroes out of every Tom, Dick and Harry in a uniform.

Enter into the melodrama of television cable (“we’re more patriotic than that other network”) news squawk shows. The faces of military personnel killed in the illegal action of our invasion and occupation of Iraq, face us from the dead, in memorial. The show-graphics announce them as American Heroes, and or “they died so we can be free.” Where is the logic is these statements? Nowhere. Emotion dilutes and clouds logic but it increases cable ratings! Your average Joe Military young man signed up with the understood knowledge that the great majority of his comrades will eventually come home alive, just like WWII or from any other war of our past, no matter how bloody history has recorded them to be. As a bonus, their recruiters promised shoe-boxes of money for college, health care delivery. Besides it was better than hanging around a dead-end town and becoming losers like so many of the young men they had known. Joining-up made their parents proud and gave them and their family hope for their futures. We all know the cliche dogmatic philosophy born out of the “good war,” that we tell young men who don’t know what to do with their lives: “It will make a man of you. You’ll gain confidence. You’ll learn leadership. You’ll come back and anyone will be glad to hire you!” Does a hero require these perks? Is it love of country and angelic selflessness that drives these eighteen and nineteen year olds into the services? Lets get real. These young men are given protection, given numbers of brothers to surround them for increased safety. They bond with their units, they feel the “got your back,” pact of their unit. They are not the lone highway traveler who with all choice to do nothing, chooses to rescue a trapped motorist from a burning vehicle. They are not the boy who disrobes to dive into a freezing lake to rescue a drowning person from a break in the ice.

It's wonderful to show appreciation for a dead or wounded serviceman. To show our gratitude for a task that held the possibility of great danger is a needed commission and in the case of those vulture-like cable news shows, its really the least they can do.

Time magazine had chosen to make Rudy Gulliani “person of the year,” like the firefighters he has been called a hero for doing his job. The cliché phrase “man of the year” is generally an honor of positivism bestowed on someone, or something for being the best at something in a year’s time. Time magazine’s honor traditionally is neither positive nor negative, it is supposed to be for an individual who has affected world events the most in that preceding year, for instance Adolph Hitler was given this dubious honor. Three weeks before the magazine announced it had placed terrorist Osama BinLaden on the “short list” for man of the year the criticism started rolling in. Americans couldn’t understand the acknowledgement. They said it gave him publicity he didn’t deserve. They suggested good people by our standards, they suggested Mayor of New York City Rudy Guliani, and they suggested the court select president George W. Bush.

What did mayor Gulliani do that any other mayor of any other city would not have done? Nothing. Is there precedent for a mayor to run and cower when his city is besieged with calamity? No there is not. His and any mayor’s job in a time of crisis is to keep the city running, to provide for emergency assistance the best that the office of the mayor can do. He did his job. Do we shower him with praise for not running to a motel room to take cyanide tablets? Is he a hero for not freaking out and going on a three-week alcohol and drug binge?

What did president select George W. Bush do that was hero like? It couldn’t have been his drunken AWOL service to our country in the Air National Guard. Might it have been the heroic manner he jumped around from military base to military base in Air Force One on September the 11^th? Must be all the speeches he gave and continues to give on network television? If his speeches had some substance I might grant him a small degree of hero worship in that department, but the hyperboloid rhetoric that is contained in every speech reminds me more of a salesmen’s convention than substantive information for the public.

Evidence of our national denial in a sea of emotional docu-drama is the ABC television v. Bill Maher incident: when one man dare to point out the inconsistencies of president select Bush’s child like speeches, he gets fired by his boss. Bill Maher’s well made point that the hijackers of the planes could not have been cowards, as the president select had told us a few nights before, was light hearted truth that was met with ignorant and emotional bitterness. He became blacklisted for his subversion to patriotic mushy mush.

Lets remember who heroes are before half the population is wearing a hero medal and suing for hero pay and television time. Let us reserve the meaning of hero for those who through no influence but their own primal ethical drive made the ultimate act of selflessness.  

Copyright Reserved: James G. Mason, 2011
This editorial was first published
in 2/02

Repost: Hard Drives in Space! 2006

I would never re-post it if I did not think it relevant. More so than it was in 2006. Its a possibility. Its definitely needed. The technology is here.

Hard Drives in Space (announced with a large ambient echo) might be the ultimate in long term reliable data storage for the people. Behemoth satellites can be built with principle of design for duration, for capacity, for durability, and for access from any Earth bound users.

As we see our planet reach closer towards an ends, either by war violently, by viral plague, or catastrophic geologic and or climate change, we must consider our data and what is to be the fate of all that we have done digitally. What is to become of those novels on Microsoft Word, you worked so hard on. What about those two hundred family photos you would like to keep. How about all that email you have saved for ten years? What about that 30,000 image collection of women’s naked butts you spent years downloading in your office with the lights out? There is no need for the capacity in hard drives in space to be restricted to a certain few for example the military, and government, and for that reason Hard Drives in Space must be a combined government and private citizen’s endeavor.

The satellites (as vessels for protection, maintenance of orbit, and routing upload and download streams) must be high enough in orbit not to degrade and burn up, ever. The protection from meteors and meteorites and micro-meteors must be primary in the design. A steel triple hull of the type some modern oil tankers are now using would be adequate. Sophisticated security programs must police the integrity of everyone’s data for centuries to come, assuring users that their own data will never be deleted to make room for someone else’s. Several (perhaps six) should be built and launched in the same time period. But only one uploaded to working capacity at a time. A satellite over an opposite hemisphere should function as a replicate data copy for the first. A full drive can be moved into an even higher orbit, or even sent to a lunar orbit for added safety.

Again; Hard Drives in Space, is not necessarily for our selfish use, but primarily to preserve and pass-along human history, human endeavor, and human pictures of Janet Jackson’s right nipple and record of other time consuming totally hedonistic and voyeuristic activities. In the far future there will be archeologists roaming about Earth or traveling through this solar system called “Sol.” Perhaps they will be humans who’s ancestors originated from Earth. But we can assure that they do not just find a planet of water and dust, of crumpled ruins resembling piles of rock, and all metals turned to reddish brown piles of rust. We can assure they have access to all that was us, every thought a human of our time may have had, every pleasure, every disappointment and so on.

We can do this! Its very important for our whole race!

Protect the Occupy Movement and the United States' Constitution

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

To: New Haven Register, Editor

From: James G. Mason

Deep River, CT, 06417

Letter to the Editor.

Dear Editor,

A truly free nation practicing democracy that has written law on parchment, essentially protecting public political speech with our lives, is in jeopardy of no longer existing.

Occupy Movement participants: You may not realize it, but through all of those newspaper and television images you are broadcasting hope to millions of your fellow citizens who also want a country that prioritizes the economic health of the 99% above the 1%. We watch and we think "maybe, finally, at last, they're doing something about Wall Street's control over our lives." These unseen supportive millions don't have the courage or the time in their lives to do their visible part for the Occupy Movement. But they will your victory from their couches and they wait for each new large demonstration, each showdown with the police, each launching of tear gas at Americans who are being very American. It is these events, we all know, that Americans will remember as precluding change.

When I see the New Haven Green used by young people in the Occupy Movement, I see angry colonists trying to peacefully "petition their government a redress of grievances," as was visualized and written in 1787 in our constitution's priority of the First Amendment. I see state and local governments acting like corrupt institutions by being bad Americans and anti-constitutionalists by chasing citizens off the public square when little harm is being done to anyone and political speech is in process.

When I see the police in their riot gear line-up in gauntlet fashion across from Occupiers, I am seeing betrayers of the Constitution to the United States of America. I see people in uniform acting exactly as Madison and Jefferson must have hoped they never would, with weapons pointed at the masses, at us, at citizens, while they conduct their First Amendment busting operations under the policy of their employers, under oath of employment, threat of firing if they don't comply. Working within law enforcement department policy alongside your peers to destroy a public gathering of peaceful political protestors on a public square is tantamount to treason and not worth an evening of tear gas launching and head cracking of unemployed young men and women to violate the very tenant of your country. If you are law enforcement and you have taken part in dispatching the Occupy Movement participants, then perhaps the United States is no longer your country, after having been violent with otherwise peaceful political protestors? After all you have violated it's first premise designed to protect a free society. New Haven police officers: unfortunately once a traitor to a nation you can't reverse that, and additionally it's a guilty feeling you'll have the rest of your life.

Scream Rooms Getting Educators in Hot Water

Update 10/28/2015: A girl tossed across the room like a rag-doll, nearly breaking her neck, by a school police officer in Richland County, SC, USA. Incidents like that are often the result of NO GOOD place to place a disobedient student in that circumstance;

CNN Story: http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/29/us/south-carolina-school-arrest-videos/index.html

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Take a read at some recent local coverage of this issue here.  Here. And here.

I am really surprised that someone might actually lose a job over the use of the "time-out" rooms at Farm Hill School in Middletown. I see these rooms as necessary and I'm surprised they are not in every school. Even high school kids could use a place to cool off and do their homework in solitary. 

When I was a boy I was wild and uncontrollable, and I have disturbed my share of teaching and learning classroom time for others, in my adventures in public schools. At ten years old I had knocked out a school teacher and had to be placed in a school for students with behavioral problems in another county. It was called the Mark Twain School, in Montgomery County, Maryland, (closed in 2008) and it incorporated all that was known about teaching to bad behaviors. "Quiet" rooms were at the entrance areas to each school, the middle school where I was, and the grade and high schools in that one building. The Quiet Rooms were two rooms near the secretary's desk, off a main hallway paced by a teacher or an assistant principal. Like the Middletown room portrayed on television news, they were barren concrete block plain painted walls, with room enough to pace, with a school desk to sit and do school work. Back in the 1970s I deserved to be yanked out of class and asked to spend some hours in the Quiet Rooms, and the kids in my class especially deserved for me to be yanked out. Separating me from the classroom was about what's' fair to them, not about what was fair to me. The rules were simple in the rooms "chill out." Doors were never locked. Punishment for coming out is more time in.

It is way overboard to chastise an educator for the innovation of the safe and timely use of these rooms. I would trust most well intentioned educators, in choosing what is best for the entire classroom, in so choosing to utilize these necessary rooms for Hellions like me to sit and chill. These rooms actually save taxpayer money and time! When the disruptive influence is away from classroom, normalcy convenes and that's what we pay for and expect to see!

Occupy Movement: Don't Rest Yet!

To: The Hartford Courant

[published December 19, 2011

Dear Editor,

Occupy Movement participants: You may not realize it but through all of those newspaper and television images you are broadcasting hope to millions of your fellow citizens. I wish for a moment that you colorfully imagine the sight of one of you young and passionate people, sitting on your rear-end right smack on the center of the floor of the people of the United States of America's capital building as a pleasant looking Capital security guard brings you a warm drink and a blanket. I am sure this would be the most beautiful display of a free society advancing that you and I and billions of others will ever see in a lifetime. DON'T REST YET! (peace symbol).

Grace on the United States!

James Mason

Connecticut

I Could Not Have Said It Better

“In this modern day, self sufficiency is a delusion of the ego.”

- James G. Mason, JamesGMason.com

Liberals like me have been trying to communicate the following for years. The philosophy of taxation's effect on all of us, rich or poor, is infrequently understood and many false assertions come from this misunderstanding. Warren is actually speaking (video below) about a type of person, with a particular standard of morality. I think these people she is pointing her finger at are those who never properly learned to share in childhood, and so never learned that because we share we all benefit. They then take for granted, for the rest of their lives that the resources they need to succeed will continue to "fall from the sky," and so "Why share?"

They are the exploiters who often get rich by using our resources and our desperation for jobs. Unreasonably they then scream for less government, as they are under a delusion inspired by greed that they had not been hoisted into their comfortable leather seats by taking advantage of our government.  A government through which we collectively chose to provide the resources they have used. Warren is speaking below about an ethic that is harming us all. This corrupt ethic also brings us corporations in America with little loyalty to their communities, the first corporations to out-source our communities to their economic death.

Elizabeth Warren understands liberal philosophy and has an eloquent description to aid in understanding the core of one of our most pressing economic issues. If she runs for president, I'll support her over anyone in current contention for the office.  See video.

Senator, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Copyright Reserved, JamesGMason.com, 2013