I have been seeing a mysterious sign recently, “Heroes Work Here.” I had seen it before and not thought about it but this week I saw it plastered in the front of a Walgreens. I went in and looked around. All I saw were a few people stocking shelves and running the cash registers. Then I had a “Squirrel” moment and my mind went elsewhere. Driving home I saw the same sign again, this time in front of a Fed Ex distribution center. I finally realized that it was the New Age at work applying their philosophy of deconstructionism to our every day lives.
A lot of people think that philosophy is a waste of time. They slept through the required classes and got on with life. That is a philosophy. So is deconstructionism. Yes, it is an actual school of philosophy. Both have dramatic influences on our culture and the world we live in. The sleeper allows the world to go to pot as long as they are not inconvenienced. They never question anything they see as long as their favorite pastimes are uninterrupted. They get blind-sided by the deconstructionist.
Simply put the deconstructionist says that nothing means what it says. I thought it amusing that the quote from Wikipedia on the right of my search page said about Jacques Derrida, the founder of the approach, “who defined the term variously throughout his career”. Even the guy who started the idea couldn’t be held down to what it meant. Which brings us to heroes, or heros.
We are facing an adulteration of the meaning of hero. We have seen the Progressives* work their magic on words like tolerance, racism, peaceful protest and other terms that used to have commonly accepted meanings. No longer. Now we see that tolerance is based on your political position, racism is only possible in whites and peaceful protest involves burning, looting and murder. Welcome to deconstructionism in action. It also makes Walgreens clerks into heros.
This probably goes back to 911 where the victims in the Twin Towers were honored as if they had chosen to sacrifice themselves for their country. The firemen and policemen were heroes. There is no question of that. They went into harms way, knowing what they did. The people murdered in their office buildings did not make any choice except going to work.
We need to be careful how we define and use words. They have meaning and when we drain a word like “hero” of its meaning we might momentarily make the janitor feel good but we rob our culture of an appreciation of real sacrifice and response to the call of duty.
A hero is more than a sandwich or a store clerk who gives correct change. I have thanked clerks for working during the Virus Panic of 2020. I am glad they showed up. That does not make them a hero for taking my money or me a hero for being courageous enough to go shopping.
*(Liberals, educators, socialists, communists, elites, Rinos, Democrats, leftists, Never Trumpers, Antifa, etc)
homo unius libri
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