UKRAINIAN GLORY

More on Heroism: “Role models that inspired ordinary citizens to rise up and do amazing things.”

by | Mar 23, 2022 | Uncategorized

By Ralph Benko Glory to Ukraine!

 

 

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Statue of Ramses II, public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia

 

We quoted from Roy Williams’s article posted to his website on “The Purpose of Heroes” in our first blog.  But wait.

There’s more.

Williams also wrote:

We have historic heroes, folk heroes and comic book heroes. We have heroes in books and songs and movies and sport. We have heroes of morality, leadership, kindness and excellence. And nothing is so devastating to our sense of wellbeing as a badly fallen hero. Yes, heroes are dangerous things to have.

The only thing more dangerous is not to have them.

Heroes raise the bar we jump and hold high the standards we live by. They are ever-present tattoos on our psyche, the embodiment of all we are striving to be.

We create our heroes from our hopes and dreams. And then they attempt to create us in their own image.

Most people assume that legends, myths and stories of heroes are simply the byproducts of great civilizations, but I’m convinced they are the cause of them. Throughout history, the mightiest civilizations have been the ones with stories of heroes; larger-than-life role models that inspired ordinary citizens to rise up and do amazing things.

Many empires, and even the most imposing of emperors and tyrants, have risen and fallen, forgotten, in the thousands of years of recorded history. 

Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley memorialized the futility of power and the banality of arrogance in his famous poem Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

How many kings of Israel or pharaohs of Egypt can you name?  Most, forgotten.

 

Nobody I know knows who the original Ozymandias was.

 

Wikipedia informs us that this was the Greek name for pharaoh Ramesses II (r. 1279–1213 BC), the most powerful pharaoh of the most powerful Egyptian kingdom.  And he’s forgotten, except by antiquarians.

 

As a final indignity, you can go gape at his corpse in the Egyptian Museum. The remains of this mighty “King of Kings”… reduced to a tourist attraction.

 

Much like the corpse of Vladimir Putin’s precursor, Vladimir Lenin, on display in Red Square. Putin, like Lenin: mere modern Oxymandiases.

 

Meanwhile, the name of a simple shepherd boy, David, who went on to slay the giant Goliath, and then went on to become the second king of the united twelve tribes of Israel, is known, his life story cherished by billions, his poetry, called psalms, recited and sung to this day. 

 

I named my youngest son David, in homage. And my eldest for the archangel Michael, who, as it turns out, is the patron saint of hunters … and of Kyiv.

 

The stories of Volodymyr Zelensky, an “inspired ordinary citizen” who rose up to “do amazing things,” together with the many other noble heroes of the uprising, look to be the seeds of a mighty civilization. 

 

One that will live in the memory of humanity for millennia.

 

Making history is a rare privilege.  Add your support.

 

Enlist in this movement.

 

Glory to Ukraine!

 

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