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Our So-called Heroes
Hero. When we hear that word, our minds begin to scatter for an image of the person we feel would most accurately fit the meaning of the word. Sometimes, we choose people who are close, like a family member or friend. Other times, we choose people we never even met, like celebrities or famous athletes, whose work we admired for years and years. Nowadays, I feel like we tend to pick people who are far more distant than, say, our parents or other family members. We tend to pick famous artists or social media influencers over doctors, firefighters or teachers. And I find that with each passing generation, we are growing further and further away from each other. Despite the countless social media outlets that were designed to bring people closer together, most of us still fail to make actual connections.
We are sometimes guilty of creating these fake personas to seem popular online or begin to dislike certain people because we were told to do so by the anonymous voices of the internet. Anyone who has taken part of any social media app for awhile has seen this growing and alarming trend occur among several users. Worst of all, I find that we are idolizing people we should not idolize. As people, I can understand the propensity we have to immortalize or revere the people we really admire. However, just as it’s easy to put the people we love up on pedestals, it can be even easier to tear them back down, when we…
