EVEN WHEN FICTIONALS' FALL

I hate it when a hero falls. For with it go dreams, goals, patterns, and models We so easily turn to the entertainment industry to find them. But they're found other places as well.

Maybe that's our first mistake. But we can't be too close to a real hero. Or we see his/her faults. I'm reminded of a poem I read in a Rend Lake College literary/art magazine by someone named Royce Shoemaker. The subject was not wanting to know this particular woman who had come into his life. It was entitled "I Don't Want to Know You", but I have only a shell of the poem in my memory bank.

"I don't want to know you/Because then all your imperfections will become known to me." I'm afraid I would just be butchering the rest of it, but his point was he would prefer the safety of viewing her from the pedestal that he had placed her on.

I think that's somewhat the way we are with our heroes. But still they fall. Still we see their humanness. Their weaknesses. Their commonality. We see them lower than ourselves by some of their actions. How many Pittsburgh Steeler fans had a pang when the recent actions of Super Bowl hero Ben Roethelisberger were revealed? And if it sounds like a similar golf story not that long ago, it is.

No sport or entertaiment field is untouched by bad behavior. No arena whether political or art is untouched. No small town or large city. The list goes on and on.

Does this mean that we should not have heroes to look up to? Does it mean we're all depraved? Does it mean we should avoid being near them, knowing as much as we can about them, following them?

As a freshman in high school, I went to a varsity basketball game with one of my senior buds. He had taken me as a plebe of sorts and I enjoyed being around him and his friends. I mean these were really great guys, highly respected by the school and community. Why they included me even taking me on a road rally that was a big deal, I don't know. But until the first basketball game of the season, I'd just seen them in a good light. We'd even study together at the public library some days after school. Me with my Algebra I book, they with College Algebra.

But at the ballgame, my coolest senior bud went berserk using language I had never heard him use. Yelling at the refs. He was completely losing it and it was completely out of character for him. At least what I had seen over the first quarter of the school year. My Spidey had been exposed. Uncovered. Discovered.

But I recovered. After that incident, I started hanging out with my freshmen friends a little more. They were goofier. Most never studied much at all. Most were never looked at as highly in the community. Most didn't care as much for the home team to get excited and act badly. Most were very transparent. And wouldn't know what to do with a pedestal if they were given one.