Glenn Reynolds: Where do heroes come from?:
"Last week, in my hometown of Knoxville, Tenn., a 15-year-old became a hero.
Zaevion Dobson, a football player at Fulton High School, threw himself on top of three girls as gang members released a hail of bullets in an apparently random retaliation for a shooting the day before.
Zaevion traded his life for the girls’ safety; he died after being struck by a bullet.
The shooting — and Dobson’s heroism — got national attention and even garnered a tweet from President Obama. There’s a GoFundMe page to establish a scholarship fund in his name.
And Fulton High School principal Rob Speas commented:
“You really don't make a decision in those moments.
You just react.
And the way Zaevion reacted was to take care of other people.
A kid made a split-second decision to take care of others."
He’s right, and Dobson’s heroism speaks well of his family and his community.
Football encourages quick-thinking physicality, but how people react in that split-second is a reflection of the values they’ve absorbed over a lifetime.
Greater love hath no man, we are told by the Bible, than that he lay down his life for his friends.
We’d like to live in a world where such heroic tendencies are common, but if they were common, then they wouldn’t be heroic, would they?
But surely we’d like to live in a world where selfless heroism is more common.
I was thinking about this as I was reading Michael S. Malone’s new book,
Running Toward Danger: Real Life Action Stories of Heroism, Valor and Guts, which is about the Boy Scouts’ medal for heroism and the estimated three to five million lives saved by scouts since 1910.
In creating the Honor Medal for courage and lifesaving, the Scouts wanted to encourage this sort of behavior in boys, and at first they succeeded all too well:
Inspired by the medal, scouts attempted rescues for which they weren’t trained.
Some died, and the Boy Scouts, together with the Red Cross, embarked on an ambitious training program in swimming and first aid, a program that continues to this day.
But training wasn’t enough.
As Boy Scout founder Dan Beard wrote years later, “Without that spirit — the spirit that willingly takes the great risk in an emergency — what use would be the knowledge of the best means to make water and fire rescues, to resuscitate, and the many other things the advanced Boy Scout learns?”
The Boy Scouts are unfashionable today, and so, in many quarters, are the qualities exhibited by the Honor Medal winners, or even by Zaevion Dobson.
Courage, quick thinking, an instinct to protect others — these all seem quaint, maybe even obsolete, to many today.
Even football is falling out of favor — too much physicality.
Elementary school students are told they can’t play tag because it involves touching.
College students cry for safe spaces and demand trigger warnings.
At Oberlin, even ethnic cafeteria food is too much to bear.
These days, it seems, we are less likely to exalt heroism than victimhood.
With that sort of culture, people like Zaevion Dobson seem even more miraculous.
Yet the world, as recent events demonstrate, still calls for heroism on a regular basis.
And it seems to me a society that exalts heroism, rather than victimhood, is a society that is likely to have a more desirable ratio of heroes to victims than one that works the other way.
Perhaps we should consider making some changes.
And to Zaevion Dobson, rest in peace.
Your actions represented the best in human action.
Whatever the state of the culture in general, you, and your family, and your friends, have every reason to be proud."
