I don’t want a hero

I went to a funeral this week — the best kind of funeral, where you laugh while you’re sopping up the tears that are gathering under your chin. It was the kind of funeral that stops you in your tracks, because he was too young, because we could all remember how important he made us feel, because our own lives are still moving along and we all want to make them matter, like he did.

One thing they said about him: he had an insatiably positive attitude. I love people who are like this, probably because I am so unlike this. In a moment when I was beginning to feel some stress about the ways my own life measured up to the life we were celebrating, this virtue of a positive attitude felt like a relief. It gave me a chance to let myself off the hook. “That will never be me,” I thought with a chuckle, and breathed deeper. I felt absolved, in a way. Safe.

After the funeral, at night, I went to my book club. A friend balanced a plate of crackers on her knee as she read aloud a quote from the book that we had all loved. We nodded as she read, in full agreement. “Moral outrage is the opposite of God,” she read. I was nodding, too, because I believe this to be true. And since moral outrage is pretty much my cruise control, I had to laugh. I was imaging what they might say about me when I die, rather than extolling my sunny disposition. “She was outraged. About so many things. So often.”

I can’t stop thinking about the teachers who died in Florida this week. Perhaps thinking about the children who died is just too painful, so I’m stuck on the grown ups. They are being extolled as heroes now — other-worldly in their courage. But I wonder a little bit about that, because I live with a grownup who is principal of an elementary school, and I happen to have it on good authority that he is a real person who occasionally is unreasonable, leaves the lights on, spends too much money on donuts. 

It is no longer difficult to imagine a gun shooting up my husband’s school — since they practice that scenario several times a year — and I imagine that there would be some heroes. I can imagine him among them. I can imagine the ways people would talk at his funeral.

Sometimes I think when tragedy hits, we need to put people on those pedestals because it makes us less fearful that death could happen to us, too. If we can make the person something wholly different than us — God-like, perfect — then maybe this world wasn’t for them in the same way that it’s for me. Perhaps it makes me feel safer to think that the coach who put his body between a gun and a child was made of different stuff than me, had a hero’s destiny.

So I’m resisting this, like any perpetual pessimist would, I suppose.  That man was not called to take a bullet, he was called to be a football coach. He was not gifted at split-second self-sacrifice. He was gifted at encouraging and challenging adolescents to become athletes and leaders. I wish we would talk about who he was, and not a mythology about his destiny that shields us from the pain of what we have done.

I don’t want to be inspired after Parkland.  I want to be outraged.

I want my husband to be able to manage classroom sizes and test scores and parent meetings, and not have “human shield” be an accepted part of his job description. I want him to spend time evaluating the teachers on their student success, on their striving for equity and on their compassionate care for children. I do not want him to spend time training teachers how to use their school-issued gun. I do not want him to spend time disciplining children who were re-traumatized because the firearm in their classroom looks like the ones the militias used in their village during the war, looks just like the one their daddy had the night he went to jail for hurting their mommy. I don’t want him to learn from district lawyers about the new liability protocols, to have to fire good teachers because they accidentally forgot or dropped or lost or used their gun.

I don’t want him spending time teaching children how to get to safety in the event of an AR-15 in the hallway, and rehearsing his own role of the hero. But he already does that; it’s mandated.

I don’t want to worship the heroes who saved lives, as though it was their destiny. I don’t want to make Ash Wednesday meaning out of this tragedy. Ash Wednesday is for one thing: the truth. We die. We are, all of us, dust. We are, none of us, other-worldly, superhuman, destined for mythology. I don’t want those deaths to be meaningful, sacrificial. I don’t want Christ-figures roaming the hallways of our schools. I just want them to be teachers.

I want to rage against the story of the hero. That story is does not honor them, and the tragedy of their death. That story serves the NRA more than it serves their memory. They were not destined to die. We let them die.

Those of us who live — we who are optimists, we who are pessimists — I hope we can resist the urge to make meaning from this tragedy. Let the meaning we make be the actions, the rallies, the votes, the money that makes one demand in our rage: we don’t want any more heroes.

Photo by Jay Dantinne on Unsplash