It would be fantastic if the media and the culture would raise up the heroes in society with more enthusiasm than it tears them down and props up the villains.  Eli Dicken and Shay Goldman should have a movie made of their actions at the Greenwood Park Mall. Hell, the mall could do worse than to erect a bronze statue in the food court. We don’t erect statues to heroes anymore; we tear them down and erect statues of dirtbags who died due to their dirtbaggery.

But Dicken isn’t the only young hero worthy of note. Take, for example, the story of Nick Bostic:

Man saves 5 from house fire; jumps out window to save girl

Bostic was out delivering pizzas for Dominos when he happened across a house on fire, ran in and saved five kids. Four were able to be hustled out – because Bostic notified the 18-year-old babysitter what was going on – and he ran himself back into the fire to save a 6-year-old girl, receiving injuries in the process.

“You did good dude, OK?” an officer tells Bostic.

Damn straight.

I fear that a few days of news coverage will be all that comes of this… well, that and the currently half million dollars being raised on his Gofundme.

I’m all for Dicken and Bostic – not to mention Rittenhouse – walking away with financial windfalls (curiously a Gofundme set up to cover the inevitable legal fees Dicken will accrue has only gathered 23 grand). Good for them. But for *society,* they should be made into role models. Make ’em mythological role model if need be. if it turns out that one of them is actually kind of a dirtbag… the movie can either gloss over that, or show how he has overcome that and become a better person. Would that be historically accurate? Well… dunno. But given how Hollywood doesn’t give a crap about historical accuracy anyway (witness the forthcoming “The Woman King” which looks like it’s going to glorify the objectively evil kingdom of Dahomey), why not do these things in a way that makes culture *better?*

The US used to make cultural icons of war heroes, cowboys, explorers. You know, people who actually did good stuff. A lot of the stories were overblown hagiographies, true enough… but it helped craft national myths that brought us together. In my lifetime, that sort of thing has pretty much all fallen away.