And now for some good news: The littlest Real Life Hero™ yet

[thatcrazycajun]

Darrien Salter became the youngest officer ever on the Smyrna (GA) Police Department for a day, thanks to the Georgia chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Our local paper tells the story here. Even though the "bad guys" he got to go after were really only pretend, I still think he deserves to be added to my list of Real Life Heroes™.

Personally, I hope the plucky little guy beats his diseases and makes it to adulthood. If he carries the memory of this day with him, he may grow up to be the sort of actual law enforcement professional we could use more of on our streets.

Comments

[darrenzieger.livejournal.com]

Bzzz...sorry, no.

Maybe I'm just being a curmudgeonly grammar Nazi at the moment, but I'm getting tired of the word "hero" (as well as "tragedy" and a few others) being used inaccurately so often that they lose all meaning.

Dealing with a disease or disability isn't heroic. It's admirable, it can even be inspiring. But the word "heroic" just doesn't apply. Plucky covers it just fine.

Similarly, there's that word tragedy. It gets applied to pretty much any fatal event, particularly mass fatalities; I've even heard it used in more trivial contexts, like sports.

In actuality, very few events, no matter how bad, are tragic. In fact, the kind of aful events that are most often called tragedies (natural disasters, terrorist atrocities, etc.) are by their very nature not tragic in any sense that relates to the meaning the word possessed before it was trivialized:

trag·e·dy (trāj'ĭ-dē) n.: a dramatic composition, often in verse, dealing with a serious or somber theme, typically that of a great person destined through a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or society, to downfall or destruction.

Or, to quote Bender's (non-sequitur) comment on an episode of The Scary Door: "destroyed by his own hubris!"

9/11 was not a tragedy; it was an atrocity. The recent earthquake in China was not a tragedy; it was a disaster.

Bill Clinton's presidency was -- in an extremely crass way -- tragic, in that he was by many measures an extremely successful chief executive who was nearly brought down (and whose reputation and legacy was permanently sullied) by his personal weaknesses.

Actually, even Nixon's political career follows a tragic arc -- the anti-social paranoia that drove his rise to power was also the cause of his downfall. The fact that he was a hateful, bigoted, unethical fuck that deserved even worse than he got doesn't change that.

Don't even get me started on the word "ironic."

But I digress.

Darrien Salter is a great kid. I admire his energy and joie de vivre . But he's not a hero. Saying so doesn't demean him, any more than it does to point out that he's not an architect or a test pilot or a novelist. He may have it in him to be any or all of those things, but at the moment, he's a plucky little sick kid who got to play a game of cops and robbers with some real cops.

Good for him.

/curmudgeoning