On Being a Hero

LOTR Read the Fucking Book!

I have been a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s *The Lord of the Rings* since I first read it in 1970 at the age of eleven. It influenced how I thought about friendship, personal courage, and enduring hardships. This period of childhood is when we form our ethical sense—our ideas of how one should act in relation to others, and how one should act in difficult situations when it is not clear what is right and what is wrong. By this age I had already suffered the trauma of being emotionally abandoned by my father. I had received punishment from him in the form of a thin alligator-leather belt applied to my behind on many occasions. I felt alone in the world and often at odds with it. I acted out in school and sometimes bullied others. I’m ashamed of this and regret it deeply. I frequently thought about running away or committing suicide.

Tolkien and C.S. Lewis did not just give me fantasy worlds filled with elves and magic to escape into; they gave me tales of ordinary people enduring epic challenges, growing to meet whatever they faced, and triumphing—not just for themselves, but for worlds engaged in a battle for their very souls. I was not old enough to stand up and join the civil rights movement of the mid-sixties, but by the time the Vietnam War demonstrations started I understood that I had a part to play. I joined the students at UCLA in occupying the administration building in Westwood. This was my army of elves and dwarves and men fighting for peace and justice. If you don’t think that this took much courage, or that it was nothing more than a bunch of hippies carrying signs, let me remind you of a little history. In May 1970 the National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State, killing four students and wounding nine more. Ten days later, police opened fire on student protesters at Jackson State, killing two and wounding several more. Police presence was high at every demonstration I took part in. *The Free Press* published photos of undercover police and agent provocateurs. It became a bit of a game to try to identify them in the crowd.

When I go to a demonstration now I see these same people. We were the hippies and hippie-wannabes of the ’70s, and we share a bond. We believed then that we could make a difference in the world, though we were very small. We believed it was a worthwhile endeavor to make the world a better place—that evil must be opposed by love, and that this is the duty we all have to our brothers and sisters around the world. We all read Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and knew that we were the Hobbits and the children in the stories. Our heroes were important, but it was *us* who had to do the hard work and grow to meet whatever challenges were presented. Now we are the Boomers, told that we are irrelevant—that our time is past and that we should sit down and stop complaining about the Gen Xers and Millennials.

This is where Peter Jackson and Hollywood come in. I wanted to like the movies made of my favorite books very much. I suffered a lot of trepidation that they would not be done well. When the first film came out I was pleased and optimistic. I thought the story had been well served, even though some of my favorite bits had to be left out. The second film left me less satisfied. I feared that the meaning of the story was being stripped away in order to serve up more action. The last film was a disaster. The crux of the whole epic tale is revealed in Chapter 8 of Book VI, “The Scouring of the Shire,” wherein, upon returning home, the Hobbits are confronted with the occupation and debasement of their lands by factions of the evil forces they had been confronting throughout the tale. They do not call for help from their heroic friends. They do not wonder who might come to their aid. They show their growth by standing up and setting things right through their own courageous actions. This is almost entirely eliminated from the film. Yet this is the heart of the story that Boomers embraced—and why Boomers are still showing up.

Gen Xers and Millennials need to read the fucking book.

When Katherine and I first lived together, she had not read *The Lord of the Rings*. I read it to her out loud. Years later I read it aloud again to my son, Alex. Alex faced an epic battle each day of his life. Katherine and I had to grow to meet the challenge as parents in unimaginable ways. She never flinched from doing whatever she had to do for her child, and our whole family endured hardship, trauma, loss, and grief. Alex never asked to be a hero, and there were plenty of days when he was just a scared child, wondering why his life was so hard. To those who knew him he was a hero, though he felt embarrassed by this. I explained to him that being a hero is not always about rushing out to fight evil. Sometimes being a hero is about how you cope when it is not your choice—when circumstances call for you to act bravely whether you want to or not—and that he had acted bravely on many occasions when others could not imagine doing so. Having compassion for the world and acting on it is also the act of a hero. When Alex was faced with his mortality, among his last acts was to express his wish for his organs to be used to save other lives.

I know that it is more than just the book version versus the film version of *LOTR* that has shaped our culture and resulted in Boomers being the ones most often standing up and being counted in the recent demonstrations. It would take a book-length analysis to capture the avalanche of changes in parenting, education, television, gaming, internet and phone culture, politics—ad infinitum—but this gets to the heart of it: we have lost the sense of duty to each other that we once had. We don’t seem to believe that we can change anything by our actions. I know many who have given up voting. I know people who don’t read and who have tuned out politics entirely. Our collective response to hardship and trauma is to express a sense of hopelessness and to look for others to save us. This is not the response of a hero. This is not how previous generations of Americans responded to the challenges of their times. It’s time to show the forces of evil that we will not shirk from the fight—that we will stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters and do what we can—that we will keep faith with our fellowship until the end.