Who Doesn’t Need Another Hero?

When I was seven years old my family was in a bus accident.  We were travelling between Sydney and Rockhampton on the Australian East coast.  There were about 50 other people on the bus, no one was killed, but a few people were injured, including my Mother who received a couple of stitches. 

I’ve since learnt from my Mother and older siblings that it was only the quick thinking actions of the bus driver that prevented a quite serious accident from turning into a tragedy. 

 Apparently, the driver when swerving to avoid a cow, which was in the middle of the highway, steered the bus off the road away from other traffic.  This action in itself prevented other motorists from being seriously hurt or killed but it is what he managed to do after then that really saved lives, including ours.  He drove the bus through a roadside fence and managed to bring it to rest in between two very large trees.  I recall, and have heard it recounted by my family, that there were so many trees around that the wedging of the bus in between these eucalypts was too exact for it to be due to pure chance. 

 That bus driver quite possibly saved my life and those of my Mother, older sister and brother.  That man, on that particular night in May 1977, was a hero, a true hero and you know what? I don’t even know his name.  None of us ever got to thank him and my children, unless I choose to tell them when they are older, will never know that their Grandmother’s, Auntie’s, Uncle’s and Father’s lives was saved by the quick thinking of a man on a lonely stretch of highway nearly 25 years before they were both born.

 That man is a hero to me now and I sometimes, more so as I get older, pause to think what became of him.  I like to think that his employer, the bus company, gave him a special award for saving so many lives and his family knew what a great thing he did on that night.  I like to think he went home to his own wife and children and was made to feel like the hero he was.

At the time however I did not see him as a hero.  My heroes at that stage of my life were my Dad, cricketer David Hookes and Steve Austin ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’, in that order.  

If framing a list ten years later, my Father, David Hookes and Steve would have had to make way for John Lennon and any number of footballers and cricketers.  At that time anything that parents did was decidedly ‘uncool’, Mr Hookes had retired and Mr Austin was no longer on the air.

Zap forward about another 20 years, just about where I am in my life now.  I still enjoy the music of John Lennon, however I can now appreciate his music for what it is, which is wonderful by the way, and appreciate the man as a strident crusader for peace and a ‘good old rock ‘n’ roller.  I still enjoy sport, but I’m really not too fussed if I don’t see the Friday or Saturday night games and am happy to catch up with the results in a 60 second wrap up at the end of the news.

As an adult, the actual word ‘hero’ carries with it a certain cringe factor.  That is, it implies that we aren’t just looking up to someone as a role model or a fine example but we are in fact idolising them.  As ‘grown ups’ in the big bad world most of us like to think that we make our own decisions and the whole idea of having a hero is childish and serves no real purpose in our everyday lives. 

 It is largely true, for instance, I no longer need to look up to celebrities and sporting stars to gauge my own worth or calibrate my own values systems.  However, I really believe that there are heroes out there and you don’t even have to look that hard.  You won’t have to put posters on your wall of these heroes, like you did when you were a child.  For a start; I’m quite sure they don’t make posters of the types of heroes I am thinking of and do kids still put posters on their bedroom walls anyway?

 If you need inspiration look no further than these examples:

•  Ambulance and paramedic personnel who are routinely faced with tragedy and despair of a magnitude that most of us can only imagine
•  Nursing staff, tending to the sick and dying on a daily basis 
• The men and women of our armed services on active duty, who are literally in the firing line daily 
• Any countless number of volunteer workers who offer their services and their time to those less fortunate.

 There you go, not a sports star or a celebrity amongst them, but heroes nonetheless.

 You however may choose to call them role models or sources of inspiration or any other number of titles.  However I choose to call them heroes and am not ashamed or embarrassed to do so.  These people, like the bus driver from my childhood, do not expect to be idolised, lauded or applauded, they are however deserving of our respect.

We may not ‘need another hero’, but I defy you to get through your life without needing one of those people listed above.

Where the Tweet is my MP3 and MFD?

I’m a thirtysomething (but not for much longer) guy.  I was born after man set foot on the moon but before The Beatles broke up.  I wasn’t around when Nixon was elected but I was up and walking by the time he resigned.  I missed the Mexico Olympics but was talking by the time Munich hosted the games.

In my lifetime we have gone from mimeograph machines to photocopiers to multi-function devices (MFDs).  We have gone from computers that took up an entire floor of a building to computers that took up a whole room to devices that will fit inside your pocket and have more horsepower than those other computers combined.  We have gone from vinyl LPs to CDs to tiny MP3 players. The list of technological advances over the last (nearly) 40 years is virtually endless, it is the subject of a post all on its own.

 Yes, even in my relatively brief tilt at living on this earth there have been many changes.

I see the fruit of the technological tsunami all around me.  My younger Gen Y work colleagues don’t talk to their friends, they Facebook or Tweet them.  They don’t make handset telephone calls, they text / SMS them.  They don’t ‘get together’ for a coffee, instead they ‘hook up’ or ‘connect’.

As I sit on the 6.47 am bus going to work I sometimes pause to look up from my book and look around at my fellow travellers.  Many I see everyday, some I see infrequently and others are just ‘interlopers’ on our City Precincts Commuter Bus and I may never see them again.  In any case, of the 30 or so people who catch the bus, I would think that at least half have some sort of music device plugged into their ears and half as many again would either be texting or surfing the net on their mobile / cell phones. 

When I get to the office I will routinely have a pile of early morning emails to wade my way through before I can really get on with the business of the day.  At least half will have been written by people from within my own office, at least half again will be from people within my own team or department.  If the purpose is to pass on information or a document, go for it, more than happy to have the email but if you are sending it because you don’t feel like talking or you are covering your own behind, forget it, I don’t want to see it.

One of the benefits of the technological age that works for me is that I can see the number of the person calling me on my office phone displayed on a little LCD screen.  More than happy to take outside calls, happy even to take calls from other floors, but don’t call me if you are only sitting a half a floor away.  Get up off your seat, on your feet and meet and greet, it’s not that hard!

The question I have, and the evidence I see before me every working day, indicates that we are becoming increasingly disengaged from each other.  Why is that?  Is this social disengagement indicative of a wider societal retreat from interaction?  Why are we reluctant to talk with others? Why do we hide behind the shield of technology? 

Perhaps the disengagement is a result of a general apathy.  Maybe we are so disillusioned and weary that we quite frankly could not be bothered to interact. 

That could be it!  After all, we now have reality TV so that we don’t have to actually experience anything ourselves anymore.  If you want to go on a holiday, don’t worry someone will do it all for you and you need venture no further from your lounge room than your kitchen (but only during the station breaks) to have the full stereo high definition experience.  Want to lose weight?  Don’t sweat it’s okay, I’m sure there’s a show on one of these channels that will do it for you?  Want to get married or at least have a meaningful relationship? No worries, there’s plenty to choose from and the nation’s newest singing, cooking, dancing, performing model is waiting in the wings to strut their stuff.

I don’t really know the answer as to why we don’t really feel the need to interact like we used to.  I don’t know why neighbours don’t really talk to each other any more.  I don’t know why we feel the need to take our cues from TV psychologists.  I don’t know why the biggest selling communication devices are the same ones that mean we don’t really have to talk to each other any more.

However, I do know that there are some who are resisting the tide.  There are some who will continue to talk when others around them are up to their neck in blackberries.  There are some for whom the art of conversation and interaction is exactly that, an art. 

These people don’t belong to Generation X or Gen Y, they aren’t Baby Boomers and they aren’t of the Pre-War Generation.  They are like any one of us.  They are indistinguishable from their fellow humans in most ways except that when you are on the bus and you look around, these people won’t look away, they won’t seek refuge in their technology, no, they will do the ‘unthinkable’, they will make eye contact with you, they will nod and they might even say “hello”.  Don’t be afraid, this is conversation, you might even enjoy it, but don’t talk too loudly, it upsets the other commuters. 

 

Holy Bongo Playing Greek Philosophers!

Last week as I was walking through the pedestrian mall, which is my city’s main street, on my way to work I saw a situation involving a person and two police officers.  At first I thought the person had had some sort of accident and was being assisted by the officers however as I drew closer it became apparent that he was not hurt but was more likely a vagrant who had chosen the wrong patch of sidewalk to set up the bongo drums he had upon his lap.  The person was sitting on the ground and was being questioned, or at least it seemed that way, by one of the police officers whilst the other office was putting on a pair of gloves. 

I took the scene in and continued on my way to work.  By the time I had reached my desk I had created an entire ‘back story’ to the situation. 

The person was an out of work folk or indie performer and had planned to do some busking that day but had failed to secure the proper permit and as a result attracted the attention of the law.  The police officer who was putting on the gloves was about to make a discovery that would lead to the out of work performer being incarcerated on some minor drug possession charge.  The other officer was then going to …..  Anyway my little melodrama went on for a few more scenes, ending with the person being turned back out onto the streets in a few days only to be picked up again by other officers in another part of the city for the same offence.

I don’t know what the odds of the above interpretation and summation of the scene I saw being actually true would be but I am guessing quite small.  My 20 – 25 seconds of real time vision entered my brain and came out as an opening to a three act drama, spread over about a week. 

Why couldn’t I just see what I saw, leave it at that and move on?  Why do we, and I may be generalizing here, always try to make sense of what we see?  Why can’t we accept the fact that there are some things we are meant to know and there are other things that are going to be complete mysteries to us, no matter how hard we try to interpret them?

I’m no philosopher but I think it’s because we humans hate gaps.  That is, we hate ‘not knowing’, we can’t possibly know everything, that of course is impossible but when something takes our interest we need to fill in what we don’t know with something that is at least plausible.  Things can’t ‘just happen’ or ‘just be’, there must a reason for what we hear and more particularly for what we see.  But is filling the gaps with half knowledge and half truths the answer?  I think not, knowing a multitude of half truths is arguably more dangerous than knowing nothing at all. 

About 2,000 years ago the Greek philosopher Epictetus wrote “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows…” simply put this is saying that the myth of knowing, or the fact of only half knowing is an impediment to actual learning.  Unframed, or more probably un-hinged, knowledge is worse than ignorance.  We need to embrace the gaps rather than trying to plaster over them with ill thought out or ill conceived ideas or solutions.  These gaps present opportunities in which we can build bridges to knowledge.  Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune series of science fiction novels put it like this “the beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.”

As for me, the bongo playing vagrant may have played out the little scenario I invented for him but then again he be appearing on a stage near you, very soon.  That’s a nice ending to the story too don’t you think?

Super Suits, Shady Records and a Certain Mr Phelps

Something like 35+ world records have been broken at the Swimming World Championships in Rome over the last week.  On the surface, as it were and more likely below it, that is impressive.  Think about that for a second or two, 35 performances that were so good that no other human had ever achieved them before have been ‘put away’ in under a week. 

I don’t know how long standing some of the hitherto world marks were, but that doesn’t really matter now as they are gone from the record books forever.  A little bit of research tells us that the previous highest number of world record marks broken at a Swimming World Championships meet was 18 at the first ever such meet in Belgrade in 1973.  That’s quite an impressive mark but the early 1970s coincided with the period of dominance of the former East Germany, which it has since been established and proven employed a systematic doping program to increase the performance of its athletes.  So many of those records had no legitimacy or credibility.

I am not for one minute implying that the record rush of the last week is in any way related to the doping practices of 35 years ago.  If you can believe the press, the sport of swimming is probably the cleanest going around. The testing regime is one of the most rigourous, and onerous for the atheletes, of any major international sport and the problem of performance enhancing drugs has been all but stamped out.  It has been widely reported that the new ’super suits’ are the reason why the record books are being re-written faster than the printing presses can churn them out.

Some swimmers, most notably Michael Phelps have refused to wear the controversial suits.  This position hasn’t affected him too much it would seem, gold in every event contested except one in which he still medalled.  Then again he is Michael Phelps, arguably the greatest swimmer the world has ever seen.  He is that good that he is the exception to the rule, other elite swimmers are not so fortunate.  In any case, FINA has gone on record as saying that the use of the suits will be banned from 01 January 2010, thanks in no small part to the stand taken by Mr Phelps and other successful, though lesser light, swimmers. 

That’s great isn’t it?  All elite swimmers will be back on a level playing field from next year and life can go on as normal.  But that’s not all there is to it, is it?  The world record marks achieved at this meet will stand, they will remain in the record books.  They will not go the way of the suit, i.e. into the dustbin of history, they will continue to be recognised as legitimate sporting achievements.  The elite of the world’s swimmers will have to better record marks that FINA is in effect saying were gained by an unfair advantage.  That’s hardly fair is it?  It is the swimming equivalent of expecting race car drivers to compete against times gained by cars that were illegally modified. 

The swimming elite will be chasing these records for many years to come.  Some records were so far in front of the previous best mark that they may never be bettered while the current generation of swimmers are competing.

The saying goes that ‘records are made to be broken’, but some should never have been set in the first place.

Feather Duster Roosters and Stuffed Tigers

It is true that the 2008 season didn’t end with me either crowing or roaring but I was somewhat confident that I would get to do so in ‘09. 

My two teams in the respective codes of Rugby League and Australian Rules Football (AFL) are the Sydney City Roosters and the Richmond Tigers.  Both are clubs of long standing in their competitions and have won their fair share of Premiership cups and flags, with a total of 22 between them (12 Roosters and 10 Richmond).

Season 2008 was full of promise, I had much reason to be confident of an, if not glorious, credible, 2009.  The Roosters finished on a real roll under new coach Mr Fittler and Terry Wallace seemed to have the Tigers on the edge of a brand new era.  Both teams, particularly the Tigers, came close to making the finals.  I turned by attention to the cricket season confident that my teams of the oval ball codes were training hard over summer and doing everything they could to live up to my realistic expectations of them.

Zap forward to August 2009, just about one year after I left my teams getting fitter and ready to fire up.  Have I crowed in 2009? NO! Have I roared? NO! 

What went wrong? It was all looking so good, it was going to be the year that wiped away many years of disappointment, angst and frustration.  I don’t know what went wrong, all I can tell you is what happened.

Needless to say, the Finals Series’ are not going to be graced by either of my teams.  However I am sure they got some really good tickets for their end of season trips by bombing out so early!

Both teams have lost their coaches.  Brad Fittler to be replaced by Brian ‘Mr Clean’ Smith and Terry Wallace to be replaced by goodness knows who, but in the interim Jade Rawlings has stepped into the role and is doing quite a good job.

The Tigers failed miserably on the field.  All the Ben Cousins hype didn’t translate into results and he has probably spent more time in the doctors office attending to his various injuries than he has in a Richmond guernsey this year.  They are ending the season off well, at least by their own miserable standards, and who knows with the right coach, fit players and some Jedi training they just might do okay next year.

The Roosters were self destructing on the field so much that they thought bugger this, why not go the whole hog and act like total idiots off the field and really throw our season down the toilet.  Well that’s just what they did.  It all started with Willie Mason’s well publicised ‘caught on camera’ urination, bobbled along to Fittler’s own indiscretion and ended in a shambles with the not so great Nate Myles disgracing himself, his team and the game with his ‘little hotel hallway incident’.

I always have next year and that’s one thing you learn if you are either a Roosters or Richmond Tigers fan, or heaven forbid both, there’s always next year!

Blue Whales, Red Swans and Sliding Doors

“Man, did you see that Sydney game?  Boy they really gave it to them, what a game?” 

Nothing too unusual in these words, after all the Sydney Swans are having a reasonable year, just a win outside the Top 8 and definitely faring better than my own Richmond Tigers, but then again most teams are faring better than the Tigers.

I may have even uttered these words or a variation of them in my time to a work colleague or a friend over a beer or two.  Though, come to think of it, I would tend not to ‘talk up’ Sydney too much and I can’t recall saying anything like that about Richmond in the past decade.  So perhaps I haven’t uttered these words, but I’m sure someone has. 

Ok, just to recap, words said about a football game that aren’t really out of the norm.  So why ‘waste’ the time to put these words on paper.  Well, ‘location, location, location.’

I heard these words from a Security Guard, outside the Blue Whale display in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.  Now this guard wasn’t an expatriate Australian making his way in this most amazing of cities, he was a born and bred New Yorker.  I don’t even think he was a committed fan of the game, I believe it’s as simple as this, he’d seen a game, I’m not even sure which one, saw an opportunity to ‘connect’ with someone else and took it.  Chances are the next person who came up and talked to him may have been met with “Man, did you see that Yankees game?  Boy….”

Why do we do this?  That is, why do humans feel the need to connect with people that they might never see or talk to again?  Not all humans are like this of course.  Many feel no compulsion whatsoever to connect with their fellow human being, other than those they are closest to and sometimes not even with them. 

I fall into the former camp, when I meet someone I like to find out if there is a chance to connect, however remotely, with them.  This often comes to nought, and the conversation comes to an embarrassingly silent halt and I’m left looking at my fingernails or fighting an uphill battle to resurrect the dialogue.  However, sometimes, and it might only be sometimes, the rewards are worth the effort.  Of course you may never see or talk to this person again, but the fact that you have done so in the first place can give you an experience that you will long recall.  Some of the most memorable conversations I have had in my life have been with people I have encountered only by chance. 

Looking back, I could have held my tongue on the bus, on the plane or in the queue but didn’t and was glad for it.  I can only hope that the other participant was similarly glad, but if not, it doesn’t really matter because I’ll probably never see them again! 

Seriously though, the point is, we should first look at what connects us rather than what divides us and we might just be surprised with what we find.

Tales from the Road – USA Style – Virgin, Utah

“Beneath our radiant Southern Cross…” so begins the little heard second verse of Australia’s National Anthem.

 This fact may surprise some Australians, but our National Anthem, Advance Australia Fair, does in fact have two verses.  That this will be a surprise to some Australians would certainly shock many of the non-Australian readers of these words.  It’s not that we aren’t proud of our country and it’s not that we don’t hear our anthem often.  After all it’s played before all major sporting events and Australia’s recent success at the Olympics means that it is being heard on the world stage more than ever before.  It’s just that the second verse is rarely heard; renditions normally confine themselves to the first verse.  Perhaps that is a result of commercial television time restrictions or maybe it’s just that we’ve said all we need to say in verse one, end of story.

In any case, beneath that radiant constellation my family did proudly stand and a photo exists to prove it.  That’s right, we had our picture snapped beneath a billowing Australian flag under a cloudless sky in the bright of day.  Nothing too unusual in this, I hope, except that the flag, the sky and the sun were billowing, covering and shining down on Virgin, Utah, USA.  To be a little more exact, outside the Virgin Trading Post just a few hours East of Las Vegas Nevada.

We found this occurrence of our flag as we proceeded East along Highway 9 on our way to Lake Powell Arizona from Las Vegas.  Our National Flag, and those of many other nations, stand alongside the Trading Post and a mock up of an old western town, complete with a petting enclosure containing donkeys and llama, a jail, a bank, an undertaker’s and of course the Wild Ass Saloon.  All of which can be experienced up close and personal for a nominal fee.

Travellers wishing to seek some relief from the desert heat can step inside the Trading Post, which is part of a larger fort structure, and indulge in some homemade ‘cactus’ ice cream or browse through the souvenir aisles for that ‘must have’ postcard, coffee mug or poncho.

The sign positioned just outside the front door declares “On this site in 1897 … nothing happened.”  That may be the case but let me assure you the sight of our flag proudly flying on that site certainly gave us something to write home about.

Tales from the Road – USA Style

Greetings World,

this is the first post for my new blog willwillwrite.wordpress.com I hope you enjoy reading it even a fraction as much as I enjoyed writing it.  The first instalment is a reminder of a recent opportunity we had to visit beautiful Lancaster County in Pennsylvania USA.

If you are early enough, you may be lucky enough to get a seat at the counter in the Bird in Hand Family Inn Restaurant in Lancaster County Pennsylvania  for breakfast.  However if you are late, you will most likely be ‘relegated’ to a table in the main section of the restaurant.  But let me assure you that this form of ‘banishment’ is by no means a punishment.  Instead of getting up close and personal with the kitchen and wait staff and exchanging words with the locals, you will be ‘forced’ to look out onto the scenic byway of Route 340 and ‘subjected’ to the more than occasional sight of Amish buggies clip clopping their way along the road on the way to or from the town of Bird in Hand Pennsylvania.

We have all had the experience of dining in a hotel restaurant simply because it was convenient or it was included with our room rate and being disappointed with the result.  This particular restaurant overthrows that in a big way.  Apart from the homely feel that you have as soon as you walk in, thanks in no small part to the aforementioned counter and the display of local arts, crafts and history books you are immediately struck by how lively it is, yes it’s busy, but not in an energy sapping headache inducing city way, more like a bustling country kind of way.

Wait staff zip back and forth between tables, exchange conversation with the patrons and make themselves heard above the hum of the diner to talk to the kitchen to check on and give orders.  The patrons themselves are a virtual patchwork of the local community.  Even the most casual observer will pick out local farmers, businessmen and women, families and others, who with a little imagination, at least this is how I did it, might be the local real estate agent, teacher or librarian.  I was very surprised to see an Amish man sitting up at the counter in his plain clothes alongside other farmers.  His presence didn’t appear to be causing any interest amongst the locals and he was probably doing nothing different to what he did every other day, having breakfast with his fellow farmers and exchanging the latest views or news on rain fall or stock feed.

The homely feel is added to by the attentiveness and friendliness of the staff.  All of whom wear a badge displaying how many years of service they have had in the restaurant.  Very few badges showed less than ten years, several were above 15 and we even saw one which was for 26 years.  The staff obviously enjoy what they are doing and could be seen engaging in their own side conversations but never seeming to lose sight of the requirements of their guests.

Have I mentioned the food yet?  After all this is the reason that most will frequent a particular restaurant or eatery.  Let me tell you, the food is fantastic and plentiful for very reasonable prices.  Being foreigners, we particularly enjoyed the local dishes especially the desserts; and yes we did go there for more meals than just breakfast.  New favourites for our family now include Shoo Fly Pie and Whoopie Pie. 

Great food in a family friendly atmosphere for a great price with a smattering of local colour, what else is there to do but enjoy … now where did I put that menu? I’m in the mood to daydream again … now I wonder if they deliver… to Australia!

Where is it? 2760 Old Philadelphia Pike, Bird-in-Hand, PA 17505