All Posts Tagged With: "heroes"
The Good
Army Staff Sgt. Ian Newland spotted the enemy grenade inside the Humvee. Almost simultaneously, he saw Spc. Ross McGinnis, 19 — a gunner standing in the turret of the vehicle — lower himself onto it.
“I saw him jam it with his elbow up underneath him,” says Newland, who was sitting inches away. “He pressed his whole body with his back (armor) plate to smother it up against the radios.”
The heat and flash of an explosion followed, and McGinnis was killed. Hours later, after surgery for shrapnel wounds, Newland realized the gravity of what happened: McGinnis had sacrificed himself to save four other soldiers in the Humvee on Dec. 4. “Why he did it? Because we were his brothers. He loved us,” Newland says.
Since the Iraq war began, at least five Americans — two soldiers, two Marines and a Navy SEAL — are believed to have thrown themselves on a grenade to save comrades. Each time, the servicemember died from massive wounds.
Stump Speaking, Story Telling, and a U of I Legend
This evening I read All Politics is Local by former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. It is a breeze of a read, and I’d recommend it to those in the agora who are future public servants or just political junkies. It is a collection of short stories to illustrate what O’Neill calls the “rules of the game.”
I wanted to one of his lessons with the agora:
“One day Jim Curley heard me make a speech and told me I was lousy. He invited me to go around to his home. ‘I’m going to give you ten poems and essays to memorize,’ he said. ‘Never again will you be in the position you were in the other night, because you can always recite one of these to fit the moment. Believe me, people love it when you give them a quote, especially when you do it off the top of your head. They might not remember anything else from your speech, but they’ll remember that.’”
Below is the list:
- Polonius’ speech to his son Laertes from Hamlet
- “The Deserted Village” by Oliver Goldsmith
- “It Can Be Done” by Edgar Guest
- “Abou Ben Adhem” by Leigh Hunt
- “Around the Corner” by Charles Hanson Towne
- “If” by Rudyard Kipling
- “Friendship” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “The Man in the Glass” author unknown
- “Rules of the Road” by John Boyle O’Reilly
I am not familiar with several of these, and sadly, I have only committed one to memory, but I’m going to read through these later this week. This post reminded me of the value of having a little bit of canned material, and inspired me to share a hidden treasure I recently discovered on the website of the University of Illinois College of Law.
One of the most revered legends of the University of Illinois is former Chancellor and Dean John Cribbet. Dean Cribbet was known for being able to seize any crowd with only a handful of different stories, which he could adapt to illustrate virtually any principle. The law school recently created this tribute to Dean Cribbet that tells some of his stories for a whole new generation of students. The most widely known, is Dean Cribbet’s “big picture” story from his days serving as senior aide-decamp to Lieutenant General Troy Middleton, who served under General Patton. Please take a look.
A dear friend and mentor of mine worked with Cribbet for years and he told me that Cribbet liked to joke about how he only had 4 or 5 stories in his repertoire. Cribbet gave each of them a number, and when he returned from an event he’d say, “I told them number 1, 2 and 4.” This joke picked up enough momentum that Cribbet could just say “number 3″ and his staff would get a laugh, until one day when he said “number 3″ and no one laughed. When Cribbet asked why no one laughed, someone quipped, “you just didn’t tell it right that time.”
Heinlein Centennial
I promised kitten that I’d promote this press release. She and I will be attending on the Fourth of July weekend. Anyone who is interested in going from the CU Area should let us know and we might be able to provide a ride. Here’s a wiki on the Man Himself.
It’s very hard for me to be even close to objective when I talk about how much I owe to the works of this man. My religion, my politics and my Family can be seen as examples of successful extrapolations from his novels into the real world. He was a big part of the mechanism by which I have developed from a Farm Boy to a Natural Philosopher.
“FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
James Gifford
The Heinlein Centennial
Friday May 18th 2007
916.723.4765
A MISSOURI NATIVE SON AT HIS 100TH BIRTHDAY
KANSAS CITY, MO: From the classic rocketship design to the consciousness revolution, Robert Heinlein predicted and inspired major changes of the twentieth century through his writing. To science fiction readers around the world, he remains the undisputed master of the field nineteen years after his death. This July, his life and legacy will be celebrated in a unique convention in Kansas City that has attracted some unusually high profile guests.
“Heinlein constantly redefined the field of science fiction and was so popular as to cross into the mainstream,” says his biographer, Bill Patterson. “The word ‘grok’ came from Heinlein; he even invented the waterbed. He wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and was with Walter Cronkite when men landed on the Moon.”
That recognition extends in all directions when you consider groups of people who all worship some work of Heinlein’s as their bible: The sixties hippies who embraced Stranger in a Strange Land as a model for living, the Libertarians who cherish the political structure in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and the entrepreneurs now building rockets in the Mojave Desert whose inspiration is The Man Who Sold the Moon.
“Since so many space businesspeople are in this field because of Heinlein, most of them are attending our convention,” says Tim Kyger, convention chair. “We have Dr. Peter Diamandis, who just flew Stephen Hawking in free-fall, Brian Binnie, the astronaut who won the X Prize, and the CEOs of half a dozen of the cutting edge companies that are in the process of revolutionizing how we get into space. NASA’s boss Mike Griffin and Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin will be there to provide the viewpoint of the people that have done the most in space.”
Part science fiction convention, part rocket jockey Woodstock, the three-day Heinlein Centennial will be as unique as the man it honors. Authors inspired by Heinlein who will attend include Spider Robinson (Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon), David Gerrold (When Harlie was One), and John Scalzi ( Old Man’s War). Sir Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey) and Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles) will appear via teleconference.
“We’ll have about a hundred presentations and panels where people can participate in everything from debates about whether Starship Troopers glorified war to learning about the latest in laser-launched spacecraft,” says James Gifford, convention secretary. “Plus we’ll have art displays, a sales area, a video room, and a gala dinner. And we’re only a short distance from Butler, where you can still see Heinlein’s birthplace.”
For more information, go to http://www.heinleincentennial.com/ “
So, Brandon, since kitten has worked as one of the organizers of this, and I expect that we’ll be a couple of the panelists, does this push me up even higher on the Nerd Foodchain? Damn, I’ve got to get my suit out of mothballs for the Banquet. [No tie, though, not now, not ever!]
Bwah-ha-ha.
Tom
Heroes, Part 2
I want to renew the last topic from the beginning, since I realize that the big question that I asked the readership was not answered.
First, though, some last comments on good and evil:
I found Prescott’s analogy of alcoholism to be interesting.
[Syl, if you haven't gone back that far, go back to the very end of March and read my piece called 25 Years. I'm going to be thinking about that post while writing this.]
I don’t think that people are either good or evil by nature. Prescott’s right in that evil is easy and quickly rewarding–How many of the people you see, Syl, are tempted to the dark side because they don’t ever expect waiting to give them any positive results?
I’ve spent the last twenty-five years training myself away from the easy and evil. It’s been only a decade or so since I made the willful decision to pledge myself to the Light. I see a great deal of evil falling upon America–that was the subject of the previous post in the first place–as mentioned by Fred Reed on his blog.
The biggest problem that we have as a people, perhaps, is that for the Light to fail here, all people have to do is remain silent and go on with their lives. Evil, as promulgated by our government will slowly drain any good that’s left from our culture and civilization and let us fall into obscurity and darkness.
I guess what I’m saying, (and what I tried to elicit thirty posts ago) is that good has to be proactive, while this is not necessarily true of evil. I was surprised that so many of the replies in the previous topic were changes that the co-respondents believed that the society or government needed to do in order to save the world. What I was looking for, which almost no one answered with, were three things that YOU, the reader could do to save the world.
In a lot of ways, the Heroes analogy was even better than I thought. One of the remarkable things about the writing in that series is that the Super-powered individuals are, at the end of the day, people just like us. Even the darkest of villains do not see themselves as such with their own eyes.
At one point, a Supervillain explains how the destruction of a major city would result in a better world. He looks at a painting of a shock-wave tipping buildings and mentions that to get this, only 0.07% of the population of the world had to die, and how the result would certainly justify their sacrifice.
This is a kind of evil that we need to watch for in ourselves, as well as in those that we allow to have power over our lives–pragmatism is never worth immorality, no matter how tempting its fruit.
So, I’m going to restart the discussion with the question–”How Do You Think You Could Be a Hero?” Give me three things that you can do today, as the person you currently are, to help save the world.
Tom
The Greatest Living Chicagoan
I was sitting in the basement of the Illini Union an hour ago and opened my copy of the Chicago Sun-Times to an actual Roger Ebert article (a rarity during his long recovery.)
It’s Studs Terkel’s ninety-fifth birthday today.
I have to spend some time this afternoon raving about this man–the person whose writing, whose insight, I have grown to love over the past thirty years. Although I am growing into my father’s son in so many ways, I wish instead to become like Studs when I finally become the man that I want to be.
I was working in a factory when another hippy handed me a copy of Working: What People Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. I was hooked instantly. Studs had an amazing ability to encourage people–the famous and the simple–to tell their stories to an old man with a reel-to-reel tape recorder. He just set it down in front of them and distracted them from its operation with a few select questions and we were off in a study of the American heart and soul.
I have learned from him on every page. From Working I learned that the measure of success did not lie in one’s salary or influence, but with a deep-seated sense of satisfaction in a job well done. From Hard Times I finally understood the quirks of my grandmother and so many others who had been young parents during the 1930s. Race made me realize that I was treating black and disabled people as invisible. After I changed my paradigm in that respect I began getting smiles and surprised looks from people that I encountered in daily life that had grown enured to being unnoticed except as part of the background.
He has always been an unapologetic radical–a major Red, he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. He’s still going on in that manner–in 2006, he was part of a class-action suit against ATT for turning over phone records to the NSA. (He lost in District Court.) I find it fascinating that he went to all the trouble to get a Law Degree from the University of Chicago, but instead decided to use the mechanisms of print (and later radio and television) media to bring about social change, rather than get involved in government himself. Hmm. Perhaps there are others out there who could benefit from this example? (I believe that I loaned one of his oral history books to Augur as a matter of fact–How you doing on that, bro?)
I’ll give you an example of how this man, deaf as a post, and at the ripe old age of 94, completely dominates an interview with someone who is well-known for maintaining control over his show. Even after all this time, I cannot watch this clip without falling off my chair laughing.
Every day he stays with us, the world is a slightly brighter place. Happy birthday, Studs, and may you have as many more as you wish.
Tom