WATCHING the Olympics took me back to my childhood.
I loved Hercules and Superman. The back cover of my first Superman comic showed a “97 pound weakling,” (20 lb. heavier than me) being bullied at the beach.
Then a couple of weeks working out with Weider weights and he’s kicking sand back in the bully’s face.
Unfortunately, they didn’t tell me that the training was needed not for the sand-kicking, which turned out to be easy, but for the sprint afterward to avoid getting pulverized.
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I still have heroes but I’m losing my fascination with the Olympic kind.
Honestly, what does it matter if a person can consistently swim pool lengths 1/100th of a second faster than anyone else? An extra-long index finger is about the difference.
In my world, house-cleaning competitions would be more useful. And juggling badgers would be much more entertaining to watch. Are Michael Phelps water-wings really worth the (reported) $30 million a year consumers will end up paying him for the use of his image in advertising?
My attention has been grabbed by a different set of heroes the last few weeks. Jackie Kirk of Outrement, Que., and Shirley Case of Williams Lake, B.C., are two of 19 humanitarian aid workers killed in Afghanistan so far this year.
Weeks earlier, elderly workers John and Eloise Bergen from Vernon, B.C., were brutally attacked in Kenya.
The Center on International Cooperation reports that in the last decade, more than 500 people have been murdered and thousands injured while bringing food, healing and support to troubled parts of our world.
Apparently attacking international aid workers is popular with political groups. It brings media attention and terrorizes locals. They get money, equipment and supplies.
So these aid workers amaze me.
There are a couple in my extended family. They leave their home country, friends and family for years at a time to live in difficult and dangerous conditions.
When they get beaten and robbed, many still go back. For what? No medals, no great media attention. Certainly not for the endorsement money. They do it to alleviate someone else’s misery.
They are my heroes. And they’re not all overseas.
Every rural town has people who give of themselves. Like Norma. She has put together funeral lunches and fund-raiser banquets for 25 years.
She’s helped to build the curling rink, add a wing to the long-term care facility, buy playground equipment for the school and put an elevator in the church.
That kind of dedicated hard work is not so different than the training Olympic athletes put in, except that it makes a much more positive impact on the world.
Humanitarians don’t get much attention and I suppose we don’t want to turn their work into a glory trip.
But for the sake of a better world, let’s keep them in our prayers. Let’s support their work with our wallets.
And let’s make sure our children know they are the real heroes.
Cam Harder is associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon.
