Heroes

Please watch the following short scene from the BBC's "Sherlock Holmes" before reading ahead. Also, a quick shoutout to Mr Ruthesh for having the conversation with me that sparked the idea for this blog : )

"Don't make people into heroes... heroes don't exist"
As children, we are told extravagant stories of the world around us through toys, books, and films. Some of these stories have talking animals and some have giant lasers, but almost all of them tell a version of the classic tale of good versus evil. While the characters and the setting may change, there is almost always an innately good "hero" and a miserably evil "villain". From these early experiences, it's quite natural for us, as we grow up, to begin to categorize the things around us into these two camps. We categorize objects, actions, events... and at some point, even the people around us into these two distinct groups. My neighbor down the street that always smiles and waves at me as I play outside? He's good. The angry criminal on our Tv that's screaming insults at the police? He's bad. 

But there comes a moment in all of our lives when we realize that there is actually an entirely, new region that we never even knew about. This dark, scary, region creeps its way in between the good and the bad. There comes a moment in our lives when the person we thought was truly infallible, the person we thought always had everyone's best interests in mind, makes a mistake and our whole life flips upside down. As we grow older, we begin to notice the cracks that have formed in the world around us. Everyone from our parents to our teachers to even that neighbor who we thought was the sweetest man in the world, all begin to move to this newly formed gray area. This region that separates good from evil becomes so large that at some point in our lives, we refuse to believe that true good or evil even exist. 

So while I can, from my own experience, support Sherlock's argument that it wouldn't be accurate to make anyone into a hero as we are all only human, I still believe its nice to look for the good in people at times instead of always stifling ourselves with the constraints of true reality. After all, heroes give us hope.