Today is a holiday, sanctioned by the state of Illinois in celebration of Revolutionary War hero and Polish immigrant Casimir Polaski. As a Chicago high school teacher who’s been given the day off, I’m spending it thinking about how one goes about becoming a hero. The status appears to be quite elusive, and not too many people seem to be able to achieve it.
Recognizing and honoring the status appears equally elusive. Chicago may be the only city in Illinois that deliberately and unequivocally celebrates the day, given Polaski’s American hero status amongst the largest Polish community outside Warsaw residing here in Chicago. My school doesn’t even bother to explain to students the man’s heroism before releasing them to enjoy a three day weekend. Meanwhile the school district I live in, Evanston Township, battles the tension between promoting holidays that are merely state-sanctioned, as opposed to more robust federal-sanctioning, and promoting student achievement of learning standards that too are state-sanctioned. At its February 27 meeting, the District 202 School Board held a hearing to consider requiring attendance on Pulaski Day. It doesn’t even refer to it as a holiday; rather, a “non-attendance day.”
Should celebrating heroism take a second seat to better chances that, say, one’s times tables, or spelling “separate” with an “a” and not an “e” , or how to apply the binomial theorem when analyzing change in allele frequencies in populations, stick in student’s minds? How do you even explain heroism, let alone celebrate it?
There’s of course an aura about heroism through military manliness, which is pretty easy to imagine. “Once more unto the breach, my dear friends,” Henry V cries in Shakespeare’s play, his heroic words in defiance of peacetime’s placid “stillness and humility.” The romantic image of Shakespeare's Henry V (depicted above by Sir Lawrence Olivier) is inspirational, but it is also in stark contrast to the authentic image of the king and his army who fought at Agincourt, said to have been barbaric and not in any way chivalrous; rather, the actions of an overzealous band of war criminals, setting fire to prisoners and killing French noblemen who had surrendered.
My plate number block postage stamp collection, including first-day covers (envelopes franked with the plate number block of stamps and cancelled on the first day of issue), is replete with images of alleged military heroes. Take Tadeusz Kosciuszko, another Polish American hero. His commemorative stamp was first placed on sale October 13, 1933 at Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Kosciusko, MS, St. Louis, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh in connection with the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his naturalization as an American citizen. I remember seeing the statue that inspired the engraving when helping to bury my father, a 30 year Navy veteran and hero to us, in Arlington National Cemetery with a flag-covered casket and a twenty-one gun salute. The statue is south of the White House, set in the grand concourse that stretches from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial.
Joining the American Revolution, Kosciuszko became an officer in the Continental army, rising to the rank of brigadier general. A brilliant engineer, he constructed many critical defenses against the British. He didn’t aspire to heroic status. If asked, he probably would have admitted he was simply doing what he was highly qualified to do, sort of like Polaski who was trained to fight on horseback but was put on reserve status. Itching to get into the fight, Polaski had written many letters to Congress offering to outfit his own cavalry. Given approval, his legion became the colonists' first true fully-trained cavalry. He simply wanted to do what he was qualified to do. Perhaps heroism in this case was granted his ordinary valor out of our vision of “heroic” horsemen riding into battle and a visceral recognition that we are a nation mostly made up of immigrants.
What about heroism when not in deliberate pursuit, as a part of a collective, of “victory” over one’s common enemy, be it an army, an oppressive regime, a medical disease, forms of brute labor that force making a living a drudgery, or a “howling wilderness” that separates explorers by a beleaguering distance from home and security? What about ordinary, every day heroes doing their private duty as they best see it? When, if ever, do ordinary people get to be heroes?
The first day cover illustrated above was serviced by Albert Gorham, renowned amongst philatelists in the days of classic stamp collecting. Catching my eye are prophetic words of his written on a little insert that accompanied the cover when he first sent it and others like it to subscribers on his mailing list. “This first day of issue cover subject to your approval. 10c. Remit cash, money order, or unused stamps or return to Albert E. Gorham, 1240 8 St., NW, Washington, D.C.”
“Subject to your approval…” I see this as a sign. It makes me think that one cannot apply for hero status. One cannot even aspire to it. A HERO is, technically, defined as a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act. One becomes a hero when others decide, others who subject ones efforts to their approval. Hero is a category serviced by the social order.
I think of thirteen year old Esme Louise Kenney, who is a hero of mine, a status I unequivocally bequeath her for who she was, which enabled her to do what she did. She did not fight or scream. She instead meekly asked her assailant, a serial killer of three previous women, including a fourteen year old girl, while he was attempting to molest her, if he had any children. This stopped his sexual attack in its tracks. He had a four year old son, kept from him by his estranged partner. So shaken by his murder of Esme, he neglected his characteristic maneuvers to evade law enforcement, broke under questioning, confessed all, was tried, convicted, and put on death row where he will never kill again. The three year anniversary of her passing is day after tomorrow, March 7, a day that, for me, lives in infamy. I plan on commemorating her on that day for her sudden, unsolicited, lonely act of utter heroism committed when most vulnerable in an isolated, ignored, gnarly profusion of ugly invasive growth behind a profane, decaying reservoir.
Achievement of goals over and against great odds ought to grant hero status to all of us. Life is about overcoming trials that involve others. But gallant efforts in the pursuit of common, ordinary goals, becoming the best teacher of students you can be, raising children to adulthood in the best ways you know how, maintaining a decorum of honest, simple living on a little that will allow a more generous portion for the others, will beget heroic status only if others allow. It all depends on their approval. It also depends on what for me is a deeper sense for what it means to be a hero. If heroism is a set of character traits, realized in the world or not, called upon in the world to be enacted or not, it must include humility. Is this not at the heart of most cultural traditions, such as that of the ancient Greeks, who warned against hubris, who taught to let the gods be their own gods, while the rest be who they are, created as men and women? Contrast, say, the character played by Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan with, say, the character played by George C. Scott in Patton. One pericopae that was so embedded within the oral tradition of the early Christian Church that Paul the Apostle was only repeating it, rather singing as if it were a hymn, declared, “He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped; rather, he humbled himself, taking the form of a servant.” Exaltation, on the other hand, comes always from without the hero. I address the following parable to someone very dear to me. It is a passage about King Solomon, son of perhaps the greatest hero in the history of ancient Israel, King David, my namesake.
“Solomon’s judgment is well enough known. It availed to discriminate between truth and deceit and to make the judge famous as a wise prince. His dream is not so well known.
“If there is any pang of sympathy, it is that of having to be ashamed of one’s father, of him whom one loves above all and to whom one is most indebted, to have to approach him backwards, with averted face, in order not to behold his dishonor. But what greater bliss of sympathy can be imagined than to dare to love as the son’s wish prompts, and to dare to be proud of him because he is the only elect, the singularly distinguished man, a nation’s strength, a country’s pride, God’s friend, a promise of the future, extolled in his lifetime, held by memory in the highest praise! Happy Solomon, this was thy lot! Among the chosen people (how glorious even to belong to them!) he was the King’s son (enviable lot!), son of that king who was the elect among kings!
“Thus Solomon lived happily with the prophet Nathan. The father’s strength and achievement did not inspire him to deeds of valor, for in fact no occasion was left for that, but it inspired him to admiration, and admiration made him a poet. But if the poet was almost jealous of his hero, the son was blissful in his devotion to the father.
“Then one day the son made a visit to his royal father. In the night he awoke at hearing movement where the father slept. Horror seizes him; he fears it is a villain who would murder David. He steals nearer –he beholds David with a crushed and contrite heart, he hears a cry of despair from the soul of the penitent.
“Faint at the sight, he returns to his couch. He falls asleep, but he does not rest; he dreams. He dreams that David is an ungodly man, rejected by God, that the royal majesty is the sign of God’s wrath upon him, that he must wear the purple as a punishment, that he is condemned to rule, condemned to hear the people’s benediction, whereas the Lord’s righteousness secretly pronounces judgment upon the guilty one. The dream surmises that God is not the God of the pious but of the ungodly, and that one must be an ungodly man to be God’s elect –and the horror of the dream is this contradiction.
“While David lay upon the ground with crushed and contrite heart, Solomon arose from his couch, but his understanding was crushed. Horror seized him when he thought of what it is to be God’s elect. He surmised that holy intimacy with God, the sincerity of the pure man before the Lord, was not the explanation, but that a private guilt was the secret which explained everything.
“And Solomon became wise, but he did not become a hero; and he became a thinker, but he did not become a man of prayer; and he became a preacher, but he did not become a believer; and he was able to help many, but he was not able to help himself; and he became sensual, but not repentant; and he became contrite and cast down, but not again erect, for the power of the will had been strained by that which surpassed the strength of the youth. And he tossed through life, tossed about by life –strong, supernaturally strong, that is, womanishly weak in the stirring infatuations and marvelous inventions of imagination, ingenious in expounding thoughts. But there was a rift in his nature, and Solomon was like the paralytic who is unable to support his own body. In his harem he sat like a disillusioned old man, until desire for pleasure awoke and he shouted, “Strike the timbrels, dance before me, ye women.” But when the Queen of the South came to visit him, attracted by his wisdom, then was his soul rich, and the wise answer flowed from his lips like the precious myrrh which flows from the trees in Arabia.”
-Soren Kierkegaard; Stages on Life’s Way, pp. 236-237
My hope, which I celebrate today, is that everyone gets to be the hero of someone else.
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