The heroism of human decency

By chance, I’d just finished reading a newspaper article about a county in Arkansas that had recently scrapped a property tax measure to help keep their library open — which would have cost residents between $10 and $20 a year — because many people there did not want to pay for services that they personally did not use. Things like summer reading camps for children or high-speed internet or academic help for students.

The article was about what neighbors — and this certainly is true, not only in Arkansas — felt willing to do, or not do, for one another, particularly when that doing might be for someone whose needs were different than their own.

And this got me thinking about heroism, about how, in the times in which we live, to be a hero means regarding each other through a lens larger than simply our own ease and well-being.

As children, we might have understood heroes as beings larger than life, extraordinary characters who strode the world — or the heavens — overcoming great obstacles, often in battles of one sort or another. Though life fled from the rest of us, they often lived forever, if only in legend. Even someone like Abraham Lincoln seems entirely unique, and this only enhances his near-mythic appeal.

In my own lifetime, though, I often think of Rosa Parks, who was an ordinary citizen dedicated always to pursuing the best version of herself. By not surrendering her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, she was someone who was instrumental in giving birth to the civil rights movement.

But though her brave act is the moment we remember as heroic — a tipping point — she was not alone. She was joined and supported by a multitude of unrecognized souls, who, day in and day out, also did the difficult and often dangerous work of organizing a movement to overcome racial segregation in this country.

This put me in mind of something my brother recently wrote to me about how heroism depends upon each of us — upon our kindness, our generosity. This is the heroism that can come in small moments, moments hardly noticed, but which can provide something too often in short supply these days: the heroism of human decency.

The person who, in a roomful of colleagues, objects to the office joke that makes a distasteful reference to women. The person willing to tell a friend something no one else is willing to tell her. The young person who volunteers at a senior center and holds the hand of someone whose life is ebbing away.

Though I didn’t watch Mister Rogers as a child, I’ve seen clips of something he often said when receiving awards. He would ask everyone in the audience to take 10 seconds of silence and think about the people who were instrumental in helping them become the person they are — who had the foresight to see the good that lived within them, perhaps before they saw it in themselves.

I often think of those 10 seconds these days, maybe not precisely in the way Mr. Rogers meant. But rather, in these deeply uncivil times in which we find ourselves, it may be more important than ever to recall how we can, as ordinary citizens, bequeath to each other what should be, and must be, possible in our daily lives: tolerance, empathy, even heroism.

Writer Paul Loeb speaks about the walls we create that separate us from the world outside — how we often take refuge in our private sanctuaries, the gated communities of our hearts.

Heroism, to be sure, asks something much more of us.

It asks that we contribute to something larger than ourselves. And also it asks, most importantly, that when others take their own moment of silence, their own moment of gratefulness for those who did right by them or changed their lives, would they be thinking of us?

We may not lead the life of Rosa Parks, but like her, we must recognize that the world is what we actively make of it, and that the time to become heroes for one another is always now.

Mike Nagler is a trustee on the Burlingame Library Board.