American Heroes
There are so few good ones left.
To celebrate my recent return to the land of my birth, I have compiled a list of American heroes. Now, these are not your typical heroes—firefighters/police/soldiers have all had their day in the sun. Nor are they the fictitious heroes of my comic book youth with their super-powers, good-intentions, and very efficient spandex pants. No, these are the little guys.
This guy is going around with a felt-tip and actually making edits to poorly spelled, worded, and punctuated signs and t-shirts. I want a correctly-spelled and punctuated t-shirt with his emblem on it. Screw Superman.
Here is his website: www.apostropheabuse.com
Americans who get out those dusty volumes of Vergil, Catullus, Cicero, et al. and breathe new life into the stories are heroic. It takes years to learn to read Latin or Greek, and since there is no purpose for it other than having done it—I have a BA in Latin, I know something about this feeling—every act they commit is an act of love. Bless them and their yellowed, dog-eared pages; their prose and verse.
Wow. I almost got choked up over that. Weird.
Nerds of all variety, shape and size are inestimably heroic. Without them we wouldn’t have; math, computers, zombies, physics, blogging, comic books, Facebook, science fiction, Mystery Science Theater, science or Dungeons and Dragons. They contribute so positively to the world and go always unrewarded—Nay! Punished!—for their nerdery.
Keep nerding guys and girls. Don’t be put off by the nay-saying of others.
I know that you might be thinking: “But nerds don’t have to be American, do they?” No, of course not. But we have amenities that pave the way for such advanced nerdery that it cannot be found elsewhere: free and ready access to internet, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly (for unending sessions of Dungeons and Dragons), coffee, and beer—depending on the time of day. So, there is a great deal of incentive for being a nerd in the States.
Anyway, those are my heroes this week. I’m sure there are more that I am forgetting, but mostly I am just glad to be back home. Not because I hated where I have been, but because of what living in Egypt has taught me about where I am from.
So, I will leave you with a question—one that my roommate left me with a few weeks ago: What did you do to be privileged enough to be born an American? And, how are you utilizing or taking advantage of that privilege in your life and what you do?
Okay, that did choke me up.
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