The following was written by Leslie Lett, a teacher and posted to Facebook – shared by Barbados Underground
We need Heroes! They are as essential to our Living as the air, water, food, shelter. Heroes establish and articulate our preferred moral worldview. And validate it.
Their Orientation, their Spirit, their Lives are to be presented as qualities to be emulated. They are our role models. They are to inspire us. And, I believe, most important of all, they are to PREPARE us. Their sufferings are to steel us for the reality that our own heroic impulses and behaviours will inevitably bring down upon us the same crosses and crucifixions that were their lots.
Because heroes always resist and defy the status quo entrenched by Power & Authority. That is the quintessence of the Hero.
And the response of this Power & Authority is always possessed of the singular intent of crushing such defiance and resistance. It’s an existential battle.
So even as Power & Authority huffs and puffs grandiloquently, reciting the carefully rehearsed syllables praising past heroes, the same Power & Authority would wish to downplay (if not distort!) this aspect of Defiance and Resistance. It becomes obvious that we love heroes – when they are dead and gone! More often than not, when they are very much alive and with us and asserting their heroic qualities, they are – by Power & Authority – maliciously mocked and viciously vilified as noisy troublemakers, running about making nuisances of themselves. Most of them have even been branded in their own life-time as “treacherous”, “unpatriotic”, “instigators of disruption and civil strife” and “enemies of the state/people”, “unreasonable” rabble-rousers, unconscionable mercenaries committing misconduct of a serious nature…irritants and recalcitrants who need their heads cracked and tails shooting.
These are the crowns of thorns inflicted on heroes. Thorns not Laurels.
But heroes CHOOSE to do no different IN SPITE OF all this.
They forward on with the firm and unshakable conviction that they struggle for a Just Cause so much bigger than their individual selves – a Public Good that transcends private concerns.
And that is the message our Heroes proclaim to each and every one of us.
It’s not just about you!!!
Take a strength, take a courage from the ones we revere as our Heroes.
I wish all my teaching colleagues a truly reflective National Heroes Day.
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