What makes a coward, what makes a hero?

[Shilka]

What do you think makes one:

[1] A Coward
[2] A Hero

Are people always necessarily heroic or cowardly?

[zhurnalist]

Interesting point.

To be a hero is for me to perform an act of extreme bravery, putting oneself in danger so as to help others or defeat a wrong-doer.

To be a coward is to be SEEN to run away from danger.

However, if a guy avoids a fight with say 12 other guys with pick-axe handles who want to beat the crap out of a hooker, is he a coward or just plain sensible?

In fact I was the guy who ran into the middle of them taking them on, one of them had a gun as well, and I knew it, and I was also the guy that ended up in hospital with 73 stitches having been beaten to a pulp.

Is that being a hero or just plain bloody stupid? OK it was a few years ago. Had I turned and run like everyone else around me, I would have been a coward and the other guys spent the next weeks telling me "You're a man".

I knew that by looking down my pants, I didn't need that snivelling bunch of creeps to tell me.

So, being a coward is protecting the self against danger, nothing wrong with that. Frankly I prefer to let people behave the way they please and to the guy who has chickened out, I try to tell him that well, he only did what he thought he had to do and not to lose too much sleep over it.

However you do not want a guy like that as your partner on a mission where things are likely to get nasty. How many people do you know that you could count on 100%?

[kreator]

We climbed up the bank on the other side and we went a little way then we stopped and turned round and I looked across No Man's Land. There weren't a shot being fired, but it was lit up like daylight because they kept firing Very lights in the sky. When we looked across there you could see all blokes laying dead all over the place, it were lit up as clear as that. If only a artist, a well known artist could have stood there with us and painted that scene as it was then there and took it back and hung it in the Cabinet headquarters of other countries, they'd never dare declare another war if they sat and looked at that. Years later when we got old, my old darling, she always used to read from the Good Book before we went to sleep. What I can recall mainly was the little bit she used to read "As I passed through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil." I always remembered that and I used to say then, "I did pass through the valley of death and I felt no evil." Those people that I killed, deliberately killed, I didn't hate those chaps, I didn't know them, I didn't. I'm sorry and ashamed for doing it because those young chaps might have been nice young chaps with families with a couple of little kids and all that. It's awful. There's nothing brave about it, heroes and cowards, there's no such thing. I don't believe it.

[Shilka]

I guess everybody's characteristics are different.

Where I often get confused is where the difference between heroism and stupidity lies.

Blindly rushing into the middle of hopeless odds would strike me as stupid.

Blindly rushing into the middle of hopeless odds, knowing it is hopeless and doing it anyway I consider heroic.

Blindly shooting at everything that moves while posessing overhelming firepower strikes me as being cowardly.

One could also argue it is sensible, because when everything else has been flattened you fulfil the requirements for self-preservation.

A hero isnt always the man who does great, brave things.

If someone is unafraid of death they can perform well, but that isnt heroism, it is stupidity.

When one is afraid, but fights his own demons and overcomes his fears and fights the great fight, that is the hero.

Something Bush will never be..Owl

[Psycho Thylacine]

Real violence has a type of chaos at the core of its nature that is very hard to describe. Often enough, random, unpredictable and very peripheral factors, such as a good nights sleep, will have more to do with how an indidividual deals with such a situation than his or her suposed moral qualities.

The usual response to a sudden eruption of violence into ones life is a sense of stunned bewilderment and disbelief which will precede the fear for ones safety. The inability to react, or react wisely, may stem from inexperience and confusion rather than cowardice or stupidity.

[TDPushkin]

__________________________

To be a hero is for me to perform an act of extreme bravery, putting oneself in danger so as to help others or defeat a wrong-doer.
___________________________

First lets stick to this definition.


I have seen in america people that died, like in sept/11 in new york and washington being called heros.


In Canada we call them victims.

Victimis means we have to answer the following questions:
Who victimized them?
Why did we fail to protect them?
What do we need to do that we don't get victimized like them?


For a hero, you just celebrate his/her life and thats where it ends, they will be in some books for some reason or another, they might have a monument or place named after them, a street etc.

[TDPushkin]

Uri Gagarin is the ultimate hero.


He went to space where no human being has been before.
He trusted all the scientists, engineers, technicians and the greatness of the system that created and grew this capacity.


Before some idiot comes here to lecture me about dictatorship and other rubish, read every minute of the trip is recorded from his training to return.


His replacement went with him until the last steps.
They measured his perspiration, heart and all, they asked him one last time and after everything was positive he went.

All he had to do to not go was breath heavily a few times perspire and his comrade would have gone, because he was measured too and was good to go.

[Descartes]

The hero, not the man who blightly rushes in... he, at times, nows no better.. it's the man that understands the odds, is fully aware that regardless he may be beaten or die for his efforts yet still endeavour to complete the task at hand.

He or she is the person fully aware, shaking , fearful and yet with the presence of mind that this task must be done......

it's not about life and limb....... there are heros in all walks of life. To me, one of todays modern heros was a guy called Tim, he was undergoing treatment in a Chemo therapy ward. His head had been shaved, and he was attending hospital every day. The oncologists were trying to find a treatment that would reduce the cancerous growth. Throught out all this the guy was good humoured, pleasant, and jovial..... I joked with him, laughed at his jokes, made fun of the nurses, while his girl friend looked as though she was the patient..... grey and worried.. yet he was fully aware of the reasons and the outcome of the failure to find a suitable mix.

I met him about two months later, much thinner, gaunt, still no hair, with his girl friend clutching his arm... and his remarks to me... we should write a book about queues........ and he even had time to share a joke .......

I never did find out what happened... but to me.. someone under a death sentence, cheerfull, smiling and in pain... when a lot of people around him did not understand the full effects of their conditions really is a hero.

it takes all types and from all walks of life and it's not until the pressures is on do you find out who the heros and heroines really are.

[Weasel 56]

Originally posted by Shilka
What do you think makes one:

[1] A Coward
[2] A Hero

Are people always necessarily heroic or cowardly?

This, I think, says it quite well.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

[EZland]

I've been a Coward and an Hero... many times....
'A man is a man and his circunstances':)

[Mari]

Originally posted by Weasel 56
This, I think, says it quite well.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

[stranger]

Here is the thing;
you define for yourself what you think to be a hero and what you think to be a coward. You make your own assesment what you can and you can't do. If you claim you can do such and such thing, yet confronted with it you run, you might be a coward. Yet confronted with something you thought you'd never being able to do, you make the opposite decision in a split moment - you might very well be a hero.

[stranger]

Azov...
It was one of my lyrical and pensive moments...:rolleyes:
You've ruined it all:mad: :mad:

PS. Did you get my last e-mail BTW? :cool:

[EZland]

stranger: anyone knows (acoordingly to his moral and ethic values) if he acted like a cow or a hero... but sometimes somewhere there is a strange 'clik'...

(semantics **s a part)

btw: strange is a bery unteliggent fat cat....:D :cool:

[acdbrn666]

IMO, the definition of a hero can be summed up in the Command oath of the US Air Force Pararescue Unit. These are the men who risk their lives by jumping from a Blackhawk helicopter into hurricane waters to rescue mariners and go behind enemy lines to rescue downed pilots. If you've seen "The Perfect Storm" you are familiar with them.

"This we do, so that others may live."

[stranger]

"stranger: anyone knows (acoordingly to his moral and ethic values) if he acted like a cow or a hero... but sometimes somewhere there is a strange 'clik'..."

No, EZ - people often *THINK* they know what they can or can't do, but their own asssesment is not always correct, until put to test. (that's where that strange click" might come from.) ;)

"btw: strange is a bery unteliggent fat cat.... "

Whatever. I ain't gonna to fix your keyboard. Don't count on it...:D

[stranger]

Reply 1.: "I am here to serve." - Fidel Castro, Havana, January 8, 1959.

Reply 2: Yes.


Azovsky, I am a rabid Zionist and don't care too much for Fidel
(although lately I must admit, he amazes me a bit. I'd expect him to jump the socialist boat as soon as Russia went down.)


Reply2 :)

[EZland]

yes stranger people think....
Now we have a semantics prob here.:cool:
No, EZ - people often *THINK* they know what they can or can't do, but their own asssesment is not always correct, until put to test. (that's where that strange click" might come from.)

But that unknown stuff is what we are talking about... :)
:p

Not sure about heroes or cowards. But Courage was once defined, by some Vietnam vet I can't remember the name of, as "not the absence of fear, but rather the ability to continue operating effectively in the presence of fear."

I think it's largely down to training and experience. Doctors, nurses and members of the emergency services being the most notable examples.

[Weasel 56]

Originally posted by WilliamZeebub
Not sure about heroes or cowards. But Courage was once defined, by some Vietnam vet I can't remember the name of, as "not the absence of fear, but rather the ability to continue operating effectively in the presence of fear."

I think it's largely down to training and experience. Doctors, nurses and members of the emergency services being the most notable examples.

I've heard that before. I looked up a few different sayings on courage that also follow the same theme.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Courage is being scared to death - but saddling up anyway.
John Wayne (1907 - 1979)

Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared.
Eddie Rickenbacker (1890 - 1973)

Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.
Harold Wilson (1916 - 1995)

[babayaga]

Simple a coward will not do what you would do,a hero will do what you will not do

[EZland]

azov: for the f zillion time.... I don't own f milk cows....k...
f....
bore...:mad:

[EZland]

Alentejo woman... Ukranian and Modavian ones.....
sheeeesh:cool: