Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?

I don't know if Joe DiMaggio was really a hero, I've never considered an athlete to be a hero, although I have to say that growing up Magic Johnson would have been the closest thing, somebody that I admired, and for that matter still do as the greatest winner in sports. The question is where have the heroes gone, and will we ever have another? There are five people from the 20th century that I would classify as heroes, people that are worthy of admiration and respect for what they stood for, what they accomplished, and how they lived their lives. For sure these people had their flaws, as any naysayer will be sure to tell us. FDR was anti-Semitic, MLK was a noted womanizer, Mahatma Gandhi apparently made racist statements during his early career in South Africa, Winston Churchill smoked, and Robert Kennedy must have had some transgressions as a member of the Kennedy clan, one of the most overrated families in our American legend. But the true measure of a hero isn't that they are a perfect and flawless person, any person of faith would know there is no such person, short of maybe Christ, or Muhammad, or Buddha himself. The true measure of a hero is someone who sacrificed expediency for what they felt was right, and who fought the good fight despite the often insurmountable odds, and someone who stood up for what they believed in, even when the rest of the world may not have been ready to accept what they were striving for.

There are two things that have gotten me thinking about real heroes. The first is the date, this being what would have been the 89th birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. had he still been alive. MLK is like the Rolling Stones in the sense that people recognize his greatness but don't really appreciate it. The personal sacrifices he made in order to devote himself to a cause greater than himself is often overlooked. And while it may be true that it took a politician such as LBJ to put his dream into action, as Hilary Clinton has recently reminded us, it is silly to think that Johnson or any other politician would have acted without the pressure exerted by King and other leaders and participants in the civil rights movement. Unless that politician was Bobby Kennedy, a white man who stood for civil rights before it became fashionable or politically correct to do so. Had both him and King not been gunned down in their prime it is reasonable to think that our nation would be a different and better place today, one with less cynicism, racism, and less glorification of war. We'll never know, but it is interesting to imagine the possibilities.

The second thing that got me thinking about heroes, and whether or not the breed came to an end in 1968 is the current state of the campaign between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. What seemed to be an historic campaign full of hope and optimism has rapidly turned sour, and one wonders if the bad taste left by this past week's rhetoric can be easily washed away. The campaign for change has become the same old same old, full of bitter attacks and innuendo, racially based and gender based, often waged by surrogates. Clinton gets a prominent black man to attack Obama, who in response plays the very race card his supposed new politics was going to keep buried in the deck. I found myself for a moment trying to pick sides, until I realized that I side with neither of them. They are both rich, privileged elites who really don't understand nor represent me and the things that I care about. And they certainly don't represent the people in our society, namely the working class and the disenfranchised that deserve representation the most, the way that MLK, FDR, RFK, and Gandhi did. It's hard to imagine any of those historical figures railing about how high gas prices were tragically keeping the middle class from driving their SUV's to the mall as often as they used to, or how making greedy decisions when taking out a mortgage might lead them to, gasp, become renters when their bogus loans went bad. Where are we in our society that the best we can do is to worry about middle class health care, and whether the extra premiums our employers are forced to pay might cut into the amount they contribute to our 401 K's, or how corporate greed might effect our stock portfolios.

There are a handful of people dying in Iraq every day in a war that never needed to be fought and doesn't need to continue. The death total is almost 4000 now total, not to mention the tens of thousands with physical and mental wounds that won't heal before the next election cycle comes to a merciful end. There are children of migrants who have grown up in our country, as American as any native born kid, who aren't sure if their parents and their families will be able to keep living their version of the American dream, one that is much more modest than most in the middle class would ever consider. There is poverty, hunger, violence against women, and an increasing prison population, not to mention a decreasing population of high school graduates. Are Clinton, Obama, or Edwards talking about any of these issues? No more so than any of the Republicans, who are busy fighting over how to keep the Mexicans out and how to get people in Michigan their jobs back from wherever they went to. Who looks out for the poor the way that King and Kennedy, Roosevelt and Gandhi once did?

I don't know about Joe DiMaggio, but I do know that there isn't a single person in my lifetime, which started two years after the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, that I can honestly say I consider to be a great historical figure. Sadly, it doesn't look like any are on the horizon either. So once again, we will settle for what we can get, trying to make them into something they aren't but that we wished they would be. Maybe electoral politics isn't the answer, maybe we are looking for love in all the wrong places. Maybe it's time to recognize the hero in the everyday individuals who fight the good fight, preach the good word, and live the good life. Maybe it's time to accept that the age of heroes is a thing of the past, and instead of waiting for some politician to inspire us to greatness, we need to, as the saying goes, start becoming the change we want the world to be. It's worth a shot, because what we've got going now sure isn't getting the job done, and there is plenty of work to do to make our society what it could, and should be.