Terry Glavin has written an excellent piece on the acts of heroism that occurred at Boston, and the media’s common tactic of picking out individual acts as exceptional events, rather than the norm. There were countless acts of kindness after the Boston bombings, just one example being the online movement to find places for people to sleep on the night of the bombings.
This state of affairs is not easily reconciled with the lazy journalistic habit of seeing that somebody must always be singled out and “hailed as a hero” as though something extraordinary is involved in events so ordinary that if you type those exact words into Google you’ll come up with 4,960,000 instances in less than a fifth of a second.
The habit is probably harmless enough, except to the degree that it leaves the impression that decency and sweetness are the exceptions rather than the human rule.
“Humanity has been naturally selected for heroism. It’s our second nature.” says Glavin and it is slightly counterintuitive, to some, that an article citing Darwin should tell us something about why people will often put themselves in personal danger for the benefit of their fellowman.
It isn’t surprising to those of us who are optimists about humanity, even in the face of the horror that man can inflict on his own kind.
Gene adds: A nice moment at the opening of the Boston Bruins-Buffalo Sabres hockey game:
