Check out this article from Canada's National Post, which has a great discussion on the increasing rarity of courage, and a nice spotlight on VA Tech Hero Prof. Librescu...That's just classic grand, heroic behaviour," Prof. Miller, a historian and law professor at the University of Michigan, said of Mr. Librescu's deeds. Such heroic acts are "pretty rare," he said.
He wonders whether such acts will be come only rarer, whether Western society has become so risk-averse that we are increasingly incapable of heroism. He despairs when he sees kids in his Michigan neighbourhood wearing "armour at the level of a medieval knight" as they learn to ride a bicycle and hears that touch football has been banned at the local elementary school because the ball is pointed.
"We so shield our children and ourselves from any encounter where we're called on to deliver," he said.
However, let me also mention an asshat blogger who questioned the victims of the Va Tech tragedy:
This is a hard post to write," New York poet Levi Asher wrote on his blog, The Cherry Orchard, the day after the shootings, "because everybody who's watching the terrible tale of mass murder on the Virginia Tech campus can sympathize with the devastated students and faculty members who lived through the horror."
But Mr. Asher was left with a nagging question: "I can't be the only one wondering why a roomful of students did not try to overpower a lone gunman," he wrote. "I thought this was the lesson of September 11, the lesson of United Flight 93: In the face of any type of murderous rampage, whether a carefully planned act of terrorism or a random act of insane violence, a crowd's ability to overtake an attacker might offer their best chance. Sure, it takes incredible bravery to rush a guy with automatic weapons, even when the gunman is reloading, and there would have been casualties. But with 10 or more students in a room, there is no question that the crowd could have prevailed within a matter of seconds.
OK, Mr. Asher, you are in a classroom, waiting to take that exam. It is getting toward the end of the quarter, and you are thinking about what to do in the summer, whether your girlfriend will be available tonight, what you are going to have for lunch, and then some crazy person, without warning, without demands, without time, comes in and starts shooting. What do you do, you clown? Who the hell are you to question their courage, or lack thereof? Yes, the Flight 93 were brave, but they had time and opportunity to formulate a plan...this event happened suddenly, without warning. I find it cowardly and idiotic on your part to question their courage. However, there is a minor corollary to Mr. Asher's point.
Too many of us have gotten back into Sept. 10, 2001 thinking. We don't think about our surroundings. We don't think about what we would do. Maybe we should. Maybe we need to start having courses in school not just on the 3 R's but on crisis management. Too many of us, in fact, have forgotten.
