HERO

I looked up a lot of definitions for the word hero and in a biblical sense a majority of them all pretty much said the same thing. For instance; A person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal. I believe and understand what this definition is saying but I think there is more to it. My definition for the word hero is; Someone that shows great courage when faced with adversity, whether physical or mental. The first definition deals more with people that has probably saved a life or made a great change to the way people live there life. People like, Hercules, Barack Obama, Superman, or Martin Luther King Jr., that have had a lot of attention for the work that they have done. I do believe that all these people are heroes but I feel like other people should be put into the hero category along with these other heroes. The people that I am talking about are people like the little kids at St. Jude's that fight for there lives everyday, these kids are heroes to me. With me working a little bit with Up til' Dawn last year and me being a Moral Captain this year, I've seen a some of this first hand. These kids go through tons of surgeries and other things like that all the time and when they are finished you see them smiling and playing like there is nothing wrong with them. There are adults that could not handle half of the stuff some of these kids go through on a daily bases and because of the courage that they show, they are all heroes to me. They are the people that fit my definition of the word hero.

So in the John Updike story "A&P", the bag boy/ cashier, Sammy, quits his job because he sees his manager, who happens to be a male chauvinistic pig, make "Queenie" and her clique leave the store because of the way they are dressed after leaving the beach. He makes an argument that the manager embarrassed them and that was not the right thing to do. Does this make him a hero? Well, if he did it for the right reasons then yes maybe he would be considered as a hero but he did it just to impress those girls so that makes it kind of a selfish act more then a heroic one. Also, he felt bad after he did it and regretted his decision to quit his job since the outcome that he wanted did not happen. After a real heroic effort your to feel like you accomplished something whether the outcome wasn't what you wanted, and you are not going to regret doing a good thing for somebody else's cause. So Sam really is not a hero if you compare him with the the heroes and the definitions in the first paragraph.