The parents of an eight-year-old boy who died on a baseball diamond after being hit by a baseball are calling him a hero.
Well, excuse me for being a fucking bastard, but he's not a hero, goddamnit. He's a little boy who loved baseball who got hit by a ball and died of cardiac arrest because apparently nobody was able to revive him.
Not blaming anyone for that failure, it just is what it is. But the definition of hero isn't "he died doing what he loved." The definition of hero is someone who does something heroic. And getting hit by a baseball while playing a game, while tragic, does not rise to heroism.
Whereas getting hit by, say, a bullet, while killing, say, a bunch of RIFs, is tragic and may well be heroic -- if you're holding them off your squad singlehandedly while waiting for dustoff, for instance.
There's simply no congruence between the two.
For what it's worth, this goes right along with my long-held contention that there is no such thing as a "courageous battle against <insert deadly disease of the week here>" (as we read so many times in obituaries). A human being fights those battles strictly out of fear of death. There is not a damn thing courageous about it; indeed, what is really involved is a selfish wish to live by making a lot of trouble for other people, including those you love. Someone with a terminal diagnosis could save themself and everybody else a lot of trouble by pulling the tubes, refusing the drugs (except the good painkillers), going home, and dying quietly with their family around them. (As I really, REALLY wish a particular friend of mine who has zero quality of life could do right now.) In some ways I think our modern medical establishment is a curse; I've seen far too many people suffer for far too long after it was clear that treatment was only postponing the inevitable. Courage in that case would be better defined as the willingness to let go of the selfish desire to live and move on to the next stage -- whatever it is. "That undiscover'd country from whose bourne no man returns" is good enough for a first approximation.
I just calls 'em as I sees 'em. The mindset that believes this boy was a hero is the same mindset that believes everybody should get a trophy for "participating". That mindset is destroying our country and it needs to be put paid to, even if it means breaking some people's hearts by pointing out that there ain't nothing heroic about being killed by a baseball.
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