People just doing their jobs are not heroes, no matter how dangerous the work is

We have this asinine tendency to pedestalize those who we view as potentially or actually putting themselves in harm’s way for the rest of us.

We did it after 9/11, with all the hero worship of police and firefighters.

Now we’re doing it again, not just for those but for nurses, postal workers, grocery store workers, long haul truck drivers, etc.

I’d like to remind everyone: a hero is typically someone who has gone above and beyond the call of duty, and their pay grade, to act in some particularly selfless manner, possibly risking their own lives, to rescue or save someone else. The fictional truck driver in the Red Sovine song ‘Phantom 309’ who turned his wheels to avoid crashing into a school bus full of kids, to save their lives which cost him his own? If that had been a real person, we’d call him a hero, and rightly so; that kind of act is heroic.

Some regular truck driver who is delivering goods from coast to coast, ensuring we get fed, and our washing machines and couches and DVDs, whatever?

We are grateful to him, but just because he ostensibly faces more risk than us from this pandemic (whose threat has been in fact greatly exaggerated; it’s just a bad flu, not a bubonic plague), doesn’t make him a hero.

He’s just an ordinary joe doing his ordinary job.

God bless him, we thank him for his service, but no hero he.

Ditto grocery store workers, nurses, etc.

We seem to want to ‘democratize’ heroism, to make ordinary people into heroes.

They aren’t, except perhaps – hopefully – in the eyes of family, friends, loved ones.

But heroes are usually extraordinary people, even if they were ordinary people until they did some extraordinary and heroic deed.

That makes them extraordinary, when they go above and beyond what is expected of them and potentially or actually self-sacrificially putting one’s own health or life at risk, if need be.

Stop heroizing non-heroes.