Okay! Forgive me as I mount my soap box, but a recent posting by a FB friend set me off. I’ll get to that in a minute. In the meantime, I want to identify a deep cultural problem that I believe contributes to much of our present dysfunction: we celebrate the wrong heroes. Look at the people we look to as role models! The list is endless! Geeze! Have you seen any TV lately? The story posted by the friend illustrates the phenomena in spades! It’s a story about Chris Kyle and his death by gunshot. Kyle was famous as a legendary Navy Seal sniper. He is credited with 160 confirmed “kills” over a 10 year career. In the eyes of many, he is a dedicated, God-loving patriot that should be seen as an American hero and role-model. I see it differently. I see him as a fanatical loose cannon that is clearly capable of ghastly deeds, and I wonder: what sort of culture do these people expect when their heroes include psychopathic killers? The story is attached, but first my response to the story: The real tragedy in this story is that Americans celebrate a guy like Chris Kyle as a hero when, objectively, he was a psychopathic, narcissistic, cold-blooded, serial killer that believed, or at least claimed, that his righteous actions and his bullets were guided by HIS god. In that sense, he was no different from the men he targeted and killed; men that believed, or claimed, that their evil deeds were the righteous work of THEIR god. In either case, these people should be seen for what they are and what they do/did and not as mythical heroes. They are heartless assassins...not the sort of guy I would aspire for my son to grow up to be.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Jun 2013 17:57:56 +0000
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