Who Will Save Tomorrow?

Where are the heroes?

I understand some of you will take exception to that, and believe me, I completely support the troops. I believe there are cases of heroics there, every day and everything. But 50 years ago, you saw example after example of famous heroes. Heroes we could all admire and look up to, who embodied the very ideals of our countries, day after day.

Now we're left with super heroes in movies, action stars and muscle bound psychopaths, drenching their environs in blood and piles of spent brass. We spend time idolizing those, and yet, when it comes to it, what are they truly worth? How is your life better for having admired those people, following a script on screen? Not to mention the fact that many of them are hypocritical about the roles they take, being completely anti-violence and anti-guns in real life.

The real life heroes, meanwhile, in the military, are stuck fighting pointless wars, attempting to force our way of life onto countries that have existed before we were even thought about. Again, I support the troops themselves, but I do not and will not give support for a war that can never be won, not if a thousand years were to pass and the sun were to go out and the sky shine with different stars in the night. War is such a political game now. There is no glory to be had. And I suppose it's a good thing that our soldiers can sit safe in a base a hundred miles away and still accomplish things, but I believe in heroic symbolism.

Don't get me wrong, I don't believe that there is much that is glorious about a battlefield. All the blood and guts and excrement and screaming and gnashing, never ending. But there is something glorious about the men who come back. Those who, although they saw all that, come back and raise their families, and live among you and me, like normal people, when they know they can never be that.

There is something more to be said in dying for what you believe in, in a battle far away. A glory that is innate to the ultimate sacrifice. But that's precisely the problem. How can you believe in an utterly pointless cause? There's nothing to be gained, nothing to be won, by striving in the desert day after day, just sorrow and death and scars, both mental and physical.

It is unfortunate.

The time of heroes has past, and we are left all the worse for it.