Week One Reflection--Heroes

For me, one of the most important aspects of life is who your heroes are. These are the people that you look up to and seek to mimic. You hope to be like them right now and for the rest of your life. Heroes can be parents, siblings, friends, athletes, Hollywood stars, musicians etc. Ideally, the greatest heroes in a person's life should be their parents. They should be the ones who deserve to be followed and who live lives worthy enough to be followed, but in a world characterized by broken families and media addictions, heroes no longer live at home with you. Allen Iverson may say, "I'm not a hero," but what he should say is, "I shouldn't be your hero; your mom or dad should," because kids do look up to him as a hero figure. I’m sure plenty of kids wear socks on the arms now and skip practice because of his wonderful example. Or a child may be a big Harry Potter fan, and Harry's his hero. With the exception of England itself, it's completely make-believe, and the stories are far fetched and implausible. Nevertheless, little kids dress up like him and try to turn their brothers into toads. Television is a terrible source for family values, in general. In the majority of sit-coms about families and many prime time cartoons, the behavior of children is horrible. Using "swear words" is common and consumerism is out of control. I love the Cosby Show, but it was the beginning of using kid for cheap laughs and cute humor. The original show's ratings were dropping so badly, that they even added a second kid played by Disney actress, Raven. I guess Rudy lost here edge around ten years old! Now, on the Cosby show at least the kids were pretty appropriate and humor was modest, but on current shows, humor that uses children tends to be adult humor. After all, what's funnier than a ten year old making fun of his dad's sex life???

In my opinion, there are two main problems: who our heroes are and how they behave. Our heroes should not be people in the media. Our heroes should be our parents or close friends and family. However, the nuclear family has been shredded to pieces in contemporary society, and in many cases now, it would be dreadfully unhealthy for a child to look up to their parents as heroes. Absent fathers and overworked moms are a norm, not to mention many parents who see their kids as either an obstacle to doing the things they enjoy or their last hope to what they wished they would have done (i.e. become a child actor. Values like "giving your kids everything you had when you were their age and more" may be noble but do not work strictly in a moral sense because one's identity becomes wrapped up in what they have, not to mention that "reality" is defined by what you can see and feel and not by a spiritual world at work around us.) As media: television, movies, internet etc. become stand-in parents we need to look at our children and youth's favorite shows and movies and see who the heroes are in these. I imagine we will find that the characters are a trainwreck in a moral sense, although a smoke screen is thrown up at the end of each episode in the form of a moral, and that our children's heroes are multiple and diverse, gleaning characteristics from numerous genres and communication mediums. I am interested in seeing how this plays out in our project this quarter.