by Jason Shi

Created on: October 17, 2008

Some heroes serve as noble examples and have great impact on public, such as Mahatma Gandhi. Some heroes are just ordinary people come from our family, neighbors, and community. Some possess respect for human life and faith in one's ability, while others show physical and mental courage, influence public and unpublic, as Miriam Polster (2001) writes in "Eve's Daughters". What makes a hero great? Heroes are sharing two basic common grounds in their great behaviors: dedicating to others with an unconditional love, and making a difference in others' life.

Dedicating to others with a conditional love is the most basic and important trait of a hero. People regard a person as a hero because he has done something important to others at the cost of something valuable to himself. Without a caring love, one would not be willing to sacrifice himself, and then would not be thought as a hero by others. According to Carnegie Hero Foundation (1990), eight women won awards for acts ranging from saving people from assault to rescuing people from runaway automobiles or from drowning(cited in Polster,2001). All these women risked their lives to save others, not because of the desire to get the awards, but because of their internal unconditional love toward human life, toward the victims they did not even know. In another story from "Want to Be a Hero?" by Eric Lannak, the people who saved the savagely beaten Reginald Denny during the 1992 LA riots did not seek to be heroes. They bravely confronted the angry thugs, risking their lives to save a seriously injured man, because they did not have the heart to watch a man beaten to death hopelessly. All these heroes showed their respect to human life and caring heart to strangers. This is the stem that makes one willing to sacrifice himself to serve others.

Besides contributing his love to others, a hero also makes a difference in the life of others. In "Is a Hero Really Nothing but a Sandwich?" Ted Tollefson (1993) argues that, without Gandhi, India might not get rid of the control of British Empire; without Martin Luther King Jr., we might still live under the environment that full of racial-segregation. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. are both great heroes in history. With no doubt, they are regarded as heroes for the reason that they sacrificed their lives to initiate two grand historical movements that changed the world profoundly. Not only those famous people but also those people around us might be heroes who make

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>