To be completely honest, I’m a lousy swimmer. I’ve never swam a mile. Not half a mile. Not even a quarter. Diana Nyad swam a hundred miles in September, give or take a few miles. She did it across open ocean from Cuba to Florida, through waters infested with sharks and jellyfish. It wasn’t her […]
Most folks don’t normally think of the Pope as a hero. To Catholics, he’s a leader, spiritual guide, giver of laws. To non-Catholics, he’s a role model, maybe. In some unfortunate cases, he’s a misguided–or even malicious–purveyor of hatred and intolerance. To many, he’s irrelevant, just an old guy in a funny hat. But a […]
These two women aren’t celebrities. Most of us didn’t know about them before last year. They aren’t heroes for seeking our attention, or seeking thrills, or seeking danger–they’re heroes because when their lives called for them to do something extraordinary, they didn’t shrink from it. Ordinary people who did something extraordinary, then went back to […]
In October of 2012, a gunman sent by the Taliban–that fun-loving bunch of crazy kids that sheltered Osama Bin Laden so he could share his brand of joy with the world– stepped onto a school bus in Pakistan and shot a fifteen-year-old girl in the head. It wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t random. It […]
If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a big fan of the late Nelson Mandela. It wasn’t always so. The day he was released from prison in 1990, I watched his speech on CNN. I was eighteen years old, and fancied myself a patriot, and five minutes in I decided he was a […]
I’m a little late on the 2013 retrospectives; most of our media sources are already falling over themselves to forget 2013, or at least to start making predictions for 2014. But I want to take a few days this month to honor people whose efforts I think are worth remembering. Are they heroes? Teddy Roosevelt […]