18-year-old Cameron Hollowpeter suffered a seizure while Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old Vietnam veteran accompanied by his two daughters, was waiting on the platform for the subway. Hollowpeter fell to the tracks after losing his balance, as an incoming train approached the platform. Autrey jumped down to save him — as his daughters looked on — initially attempting to pull him out, but realizing with split-second judgment that there was insufficient time to extract the still-seizing man from the tracks. He threw himself over Hollowpeter, wrapping him in his body to protect his flailing arms, in the shallow ditch between the rails. The train screeched to a halt after passing overhead with but inches to spare, miraculously leaving both men without serious injury.
True acts of heroism are, of course, newsworthy, and at once both extraordinary and sobering (would you or I have done what Wes Autrey did?). They also draw a sharp and unflattering contrast with what often passes for heroism in our modern culture.
We hear of heroes daily in the papers and on the web: the fireman who rescues a child from a burning building; the policeman shot in the line of duty; the soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save the lives of his buddies. Such acts are heroism indeed, comprised of its core virtue: the willingness to sacrifice one’s life or well-being for another. We say this although we expect such things of these men and women, for this is their chosen calling and career, which by its nature places them in harm’s way for the benefit of others.
Yet a growing variety of acts painted as “heroism” deserve no such depiction. Such cheap heroes — the civic equivalent of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s cheap grace Christians — seem to grow in number daily. They make no sacrifices, take no risks, suffer no losses when their “heroic” deeds are done. In a society increasing bereft of moral standards and the most fundamental traits of noble character and integrity, we paint a heroic stamp of approval on increasingly pathetic gestures, gilding our self-serving deeds with a thin gloss of glory.
These hollow heroes come quickly to mind. Talented athletes, paid millions to toss balls through nets or batter baseballs into distant bleachers with steroid-enhanced expertise are idolized as paladins, as children pine to reproduce their acts of glory and emulate their rich, undisciplined, and often decadent lifestyles. Hollywood celebrities are hailed as heroes for attending media-saturated charity events, where a trivial pittance of their vast fortunes are donated to self-serving causes such as AIDS research, hedging bets against their own hedonism. Heroes in TV dramas and films are violent and vengeful, and they have the sexual morality of Caligula. Our modern heroes seem far more hollow and self-serving than honorable.
Cheap heroism has seeped deeply into our culture, like toxic effluent, poisoning, and even simple principled acts with a pretension of greatness. Children are given “Hero” stickers for finishing homework or showing up at school; I received a “Hero” tee-shirt for lying on a couch, getting a pinprick, and donating blood. We are heroes for donating a few bucks to a charity, helping out at our children’s school, and volunteering at a hospital or soup kitchen. Every patient undergoing chemotherapy for cancer is now a “hero” — especially if they have a disease such as breast cancer or Kaposi’s sarcoma which reach disproportionate degrees of prominence by occurring in politically vocal victim groups. And are they heroes for tenacity in saving their own lives?
What we have done, in short, is hyperbolize deeds that should be commonplace and hardly noteworthy for people of character and integrity every day. We have glorified trivial actions and turned them into great triumphs, thereby making ourselves much smaller by their enlargement. The concentric world of a narcissistic culture seeks half-pint heroes to ennoble their selfish, empty deeds and sustain their pretentious egos.
The concentric world of a narcissistic culture seeks half-pint heroes to ennoble their selfish, empty deeds and sustain their pretentious egos.
When genuine acts of heroism occur, such as Mr. Autrey’s extraordinary rescue, the narcissistic culture erupts into spasms of euphoric ecstasy, as if some alien from another planet had landed: they have no grasp whatsoever about what might motivate a man to do such a thing, and have no frame of reference to discover one. Watch as Mr. Autrey made his rounds on The View and Oprah, or beamed from the cover of People magazine, promoting their vapid interview within. You will see slack-jawed awe at his actions, but eyes reflecting the empty souls which long ago abandoned the place from which such deeds arise — if indeed they ever knew it.
True acts of heroism arise from a willingness to sacrifice self for others, inculcated either by training, such as that given to soldiers, or from the strength of spiritual conviction that such deeds have redemptive value, or arise from the gratitude and power of transformational grace. When you have nothing to live for, nothing is worth dying for. The saint and the soldier understand this; the secular skeptic enthrones tiny kings on tinplate thrones, paying homage to images of themselves while pretending such worship makes life worthwhile.
Wesley Autrey has taught us a great lesson: the power of self-sacrifice and the value of character and integrity. How sad it is that so very few will genuinely grasp its import.
