On the sidewalk outside Children’s Hospital yesterday, the nurse stood in the breezy sunlight smoking a cigarette and eating an apple for lunch. As soon as she finished one Marlboro, her hand went right to the pack for another."Don’t start," she said. "I know all about it. I’ve quit a hundred times. The problem is I’ve gone back a hundred and one."
"Maybe it’s the job?" she was told.
"Nah," she laughed. “It’s me. It’s just me. I’m a weak individual."She has been a nurse for a long time. She tends to children who show up here looking for miracles. The kids come with cancer, a disease that does not discriminate, an often fatal illness that feeds on the human system without regard to any calendar: 4 or 54, it doesn’t matter to cancer.
She is part of a staff- doctors, nurses, even orderlies — who minister to the dying. The patients arrive from all over this country. Some buy time. Some others die on the ward. "You see how some of these little children fight," the nurse was saying. "You see how brave they are and in its own way it is kind of thrilling to be part of that experience because you feel blessed to be among them, they are so strong."
"They are sick but they are strong. They have this spirit, you know," she said. "Certainly, it’s sad but it’s also uplifting because they have so much courage they make you feel good. They don’t feel sorry for themselves. They deal with their situation and they make you deal with it too."
O.J. Simpson made more in a month than this woman earned in the last two years. And for a week, all I have read in the paper, over and over again, is the constant reference to him as a hero, fallen now from a pedestal.
We have a horrendous problem in this country with violence and disorder of every kind. We have become adept at making excuses, creating legal loopholes and avoiding any hamework of individual responsibility. All this is common knowledge.
But we may have a larger problem of semantics, with the use and application of language and labels. We constantly confuse heroism with celebrity, figuring that because someone is famous or skilled at a specific task--carrying a football, hitting a baseball, acting out a scene in a movie--that they are mythic figures incapable of disappointing us with any of the evils committed by ordinary human beings. We consistently misinterpret what these people do on a field or a sound stage with who they are. But neither life nor individuals are that simple.
Yet we do it all the time: We confuse wealth with wisdom, figuring anyone worth millions must be smart. We rush to attach ourselves emotionally to people who are pretty, people who score touchdowns, sing songs on MTV, play great parts in action movies. We want to feel good about the famous so we allow them to lead make—believe lives, our very own contrivance, in the desperate hope that we will somehow feel better about ourselves because we heard or read or saw that this false idol or that creation of some political consultant was nice.
And as a result of being star—struck, we rarely notice the courage at our doorstep or heroes on the sidewalk alongside us. Firefighters rush into burning buildings seeking to save total strangers and it is only when one dies that we take the time to pay attention. Nurses labor with kids who cry from chemotherapy, holding them, hugging them, often willing life back into them and we take it for granted. Teachers act as educators, surrogate parents and drug counselors and we resent their demand for higher pay. Police throw their bodies between the lawless and the innocent and their reward is a never-ending level of dissatisfaction, because crime, like cancer, grows everywhere. There are mothers and fathers with several jobs who struggle to keep families together while their kids attend schools where others show up with handguns instead of history books.
This is an increasingly strange country, made more so by the foolish clamor over celebrity. It is a country in danger of losing what little is left of our institutional memory, a mental safeguard that allows us to establish priorities of what and who is truly important, based on performance as well as history. It is a country with the attention span of a cricket, where instant gratification is paramount: I want it now, with no effort and if I don’t like it I will toss it out; doesn’t matter what it is either — a marriage, a relationship, a pregnancy, a friend.
0.J. Simpson was a wonderful athlete who beat up a woman and may even have killed her. He was famous and gifted but never a hero. To find one of them, you have to stand on a city sidewalk and stare at a nurse who can’t quit cigarettes because her nerves are frazzled from caring for all the dying children.
Mike Barnicle
The Boston Globe
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