Our Heroes Real And Imagined

I have been reading and seeing reports on TV newscasts of an awful lot of "heroes" theses days. This is confusing me, for the definition of hero the media and much of the public embraces is not the traditional one as I know it. I was so confused and annoyed today after hearing that David Beckham is a "hero" (well, he must be brave to have married that sour Spice Girl named Victoria, but I don't count that as the stuff of a real hero) because he plays soccer well and is admired by fans that I had to research the definition of hero again.
According to my dictionary a hero is "a person of exceptional courage, fortitude or bold enterprise". Nope! Beckham doesn't fit that definition. But why focus on him. There are endless other examples. George Bush says all the soldiers in Iraq are heroes. Is that true?
Does just being in the military make one a hero? I doubt the supply clerk of cook in Iraq who never comes close to danger is a hero. Too, it irks me to see people place "hero" license plates on their cars. Those are the ones that announce that the driver is a "Korean War Veteran" or veteran of some are. I suspect that a real hero doesn't advertise himself that way, and that people with the bumper stickers and plates probably are more wanna be heroes than real ones. Today everyone who is noticed is called as hero. Surely we should all agree that an entertainer like Bono is not a hero, even though he raise money for charitable causes. I heard one newscaster say that Angelina Jolie is a hero. You should be laughing at the thought of that, and if you didn't you may need to get your own dictionary to refresh yourself as to what a hero is. Being noticed as Angelina is does not constitute an act of heroism. A basketball player who makes a winning shot is not a hero. He is played a game and made a shot...end of story.
Another kind of person who has been elevated to heroic status is the victim. I have heard a thousand times or more that the victims of 911 were heroes. No, they were victims who did nothing noble unless you consider dying to be a heroic deed. It is not, because all humans die. Even the firefighters who rescued others during 911 were mostly not heroic. They merely did as they were trained in rescue. The ones who went beyond the bounds of expectation and risk to help were heroes, but that is a big minority of the total that was at the ground zero cite. Politicians love to create heroes out of normal people because they gain by tying themselves to the heroes. A good politician will tell you someone is a hero who is not, and then create a bind between that alleged hero and himself. that always helps at election time. It's the "support the troops or you are against our heroes" syndrome. Nations always use hero worship to justify the wars they fight. They inject Nationalism into the war and tell the citizens to support it because this war is "us against them". If you oppose the government policy to fight the war you surely will be labeled as anti hero.
So who do I think is a hero? Well, there aren't many. That's the nature of true heroism. It requires a special act to become a hero. One example of a hero today is the fellow (I forgot his name...sigh....but of course I remembered hero David Beckham's name) who recently jumped on a NYC subway rail line as a train was approaching and saved a stranger who had fallen on the tracks by pushing himself on top of the stranger in a crevice of the tracks as the train roared past.
I think it is wise to be careful before embracing one as a hero. A society that cheapens heroism by including Angelina Jolie, for instance, cheapens it self. Heroes should emerge suddenly because of singular acts so that their deed is heroic even if their character may not be all of the time. We admire that hero for what he or she did, but that's it. The other kind of heroes that society creates, the kind that are heroes 24 hours a day every day and appear in movies and books, exist only in the minds of those who need to find their dictionary to research the term.