Not what Bonnie Tyler meant

When did the word "hero" become so devalued in modern life? 

It seems everyone who does something that can be spun as bringing even a modest amount of glory to this country gets called a hero. Or anyone who does something even a little bit impressive gets called a hero.

Now I admit I don’t remember a lot of the news from when I was a child (I didn’t pay much attention to it back then, because I was a child), but even when we were liberating The Falklands, the politicians and news services described the various men and women who were involved in the conflict as "brave men and women" or "our brave troops". There were no references to heroes, unless someone did something above and beyond the call of duty.

And, I mentioned in previous entries, I have been reading a book set during World War I – about the Canadian troops who went to fight in Flanders, and the men and women they left behind.

Only once in the book is the word hero used to refer to the troops, and that is when Walter Bylthe (big brother of the heroine of the novel) saves the life of another solider at massive risk of his own, and is rewarded the DC for his actions.

Then if you read some of the speeches of Winston Churchill ("Blood, Sweat And Toil", "Fight Them On The Beaches", "Their Finest Hour", "Never in the field" and so on) there are (as far as I have found) no mentions of heroes. Just praising the men and women who are doing their duty and holding back the night.

And don’t get me wrong – he doesn’t give them any less praise than they deserve or sell them short. But he manages it without using the word hero or using excessive rhetoric or hyperbole.

But nowadays it seems that you can’t turn around without someone thrusting a hero down your throat.

First it was the military, which – to one degree or another – I can understand. Although, as I’ve said, previous generations did not feel the need to use such terms, and no one can doubt that they supported and appreciated the military as much as people do today. So why we now have the need to hype up our armed forces is a bit of a mystery.

And then it spread. 

Now it seems that the term "hero" is applied to anyone who does something that someone else wants to claim some of the glory from. (And yes, I know that is a ludicrously tortured sentence, but stick with me and I will explain it).

This year we saw a lot of people running about, throwing things, rowing around and riding horses. And some of them actually ran, threw things, rowed and rode horses better than the others, and got given a bit of metal on the end of a ribbon as a reward. 

But if that was it – if the only thing this country gained out of spending £20m of public money was some people with some bits of metal, then the public would probably feel short changed and quite probably ripped off. 

So the politicians got the idea to refer to these people with bits of metal as "heroes", because it means that a) the politicians can claim part of their glory and b) the rest of us can also claim part of their glory. ("These are BRITISH HEROES, so aren’t we all a little bit better because that guy rowed really quickly and that guy on the horse did some jumping really well!").

A slightly more cynical person than I would say that the politicians are using the military for exactly the same thing. That the more they play up the "magnificent heroes who fight to keep our country safe", the more people have to believe that our country is worth keeping safe – after all, if we have heroes as these to protect it, then there must be something worth protecting, all appearances to the contrary. 

But whatever the reason they are doing it, the simple fact is that the term hero has now become  so ubiquitous in our society that it is on the verge of losing all meaning. 

Imagine, if you will, the following scenarios :-

You go off to a foreign land to fight and potentially die for your country. You spend your tour under constant fire, risking life and limb every time you move. You see your team-mates – your friends – blown apart in front of you.

You return home and are welcomed as a hero. 

Then, the next morning, you open up your paper to discover that a guy who cycled around a veladrome slightly faster than someone else cycled around it is also being called a hero. 

Then, the morning after that, you open up your paper to find an eight year old girl who sold one hundred sheets of wrapping paper so that her brother could go to Disney Land is being hailed as a hero.

And the morning after that, you open up your paper to find a guy who managed to win six games of tennis in a row, but then lost the seventh, is being called a national hero.

Wouldn’t it make you feel a tad under appreciated? 

I have no doubt that there are still true heroes in this world. People who do thinks so outstanding, so courageous that there should be no other word to describe them.

But the more we allow it to be applied to people who really don’t deserve it – the more we let it be abused and devalued – then when we actually encounter a true, honest-to-goodness hero, we will simply lump them in with all the rest.
 

And instead of honouring them as we should, we will be insulting them in the worst way imaginable.