Anyone can quibble over the definition of hero and of whether he deserves the title (I would be on record with a hearty “Indeed-heh”), but here is what it comes down to in my book: if I had kids, I would want them to see this and see him being lauded for it. It’s a lesson in what we value as a society: responsibility, courage, self-sacrifice, and then having a humble attitude about it at the end of the day.
I would much rather have kids looking up to that behavior than taking as “heroic” the behavior of any number of athletes or Hollywood figures. Certainly there are some of those who deserve praise for what they do, but it would be hard to label any of them as “hero” at the end of the day. What they do for a living is always some level of play time; what Sully did was a matter of keeping those folks alive for another day.
What does get me is when anyone calls it a miracle. It wasn’t: it was a captain, a crew, passengers, and then the people around them all doing what needed to be done in a time of crisis. The lesson to learn is to be prepared, to be brave in the face of long odds, and to work hard at whatever it is that you do.
Sully is a great example of something that seems terribly rare these days: an adult. That may not be heroic, but it’s certainly something to celebrate and hope our kids learn to emulate.
