Nicolo Lothario
The prompt from Prompts Galore asks us to "write about coming to the realization that your heroes are only human."
Several times the realization has been one of these: guy seems like the perfect catch. He's married with kids, seems like a great husband and father, oh, if only I could find someone like...
Great googly moogly! So sorry, Spouse of Cheating Dog. Turns out that instead of being such a good guy after all, he's a rampant womanizer. Not going to name names, but I've been sorely disappointed by having perceived no few of these cads as heroes in the field of romance and can only count my blessings that I wasn't the poor fool who ended up with them. Not being pretty does have its perks. Guys like this ignore the existence of women who look like me.
Circa 1973
My father actually was one of the good ones. He and I didn't always get along. He had certain very conservative ideals that didn't jibe with my very liberal ones. He could be overbearing. However, he had a genuinely good heart, and I could always count on him being there when I needed him.
Until a hemorrhagic stroke severely compromised him, and thereafter he developed vascular dementia and congestive heart failure and spent six years with both his physical and cognitive health declining until he finally, mercifully, passed from this world in a peaceful room at the hospice center.
Everything dies, but the long, drawn-out way my father died pretty well shook my belief in an ordered Universe. Good people are allowed a merciful death, right? They don't have to suffer for years and years, becoming more and more fearful as the twilight takes over their mind, right?
Well, that was the most naïve thought ever. We should probably scan my head and see if I even have a brain, or if I long ago replaced it with a rotting lump of Limburger cheese.
Malcolm Young was my hero from the time I was twelve years old. He doesn't really look or sound like one might think a hero would. He's tiny, somewhere around five foot three and weighing something around 110 pounds when he's been eating hearty. He's a shy, nondescript man with a quiet voice. So, what would cause me to think of someone like that as a hero?
Malcolm took no shit from anybody, and he didn't like crappy behavior. He disliked bullies. He was sympathetic to people who were victimized by the mean-spirited sort who gets off on putting others down. In other words, I knew from the start that he cared about people like me, who tend to be the target of the mean-spirited lot. People who are shy, who aren't conventionally attractive, who are even, dare I say it, mentally ill. That's what makes him a role model, and, yes, a hero.
His family seems to have some genetic tendency to cancer and vascular disease. So, you'd figure it might be one of those things that would take him out. Oh, but no. He couldn't have gotten lucky and died from the heart problems that he had in the early 2000s, or the stroke that he had in 2014. That would have been too easy.
Nope, instead he has to be dying from a horrid form of dementia that has literally shrunken his brain and left him so he can't remember the things he did during his life, or the people he did them with. This disease took him from being a low-key but decidedly brave hero and a very independent personality to being a very sick, very confused victim whose once-alert eyes are bewildered and terrified, and who requires constant supervision.
You know where my faith has really been shaken in this whole mess?
The idea of a benevolent, ordered Universe seems rather improbable to me.
I'm not an atheist, but I haven't believed in the Church God for years. Deism seems far more plausible to me than theism, given the nature of things. I can buy the idea of a grand creator, but I don't really think it gives two fucks about us. Oh, it may be benevolently disposed to its creations, but it's also pretty detached, much like a person who raises fish whose purpose is to repopulate lakes and streams. This person cares about the fish as a population. They don't focus on the fish as individuals.
I think we're kind of on our own, as far as things go. Yes, I believe in a soul that survives the death of the body. To me, reincarnation seems the most likely course of events. Energy never dies, it simply changes form, and the spirit is pure energy. Eventually, it will find another body to inhabit. That's how I see it, anyway.
Sometimes my thoughts on the matter are similar to Sam Winchester's.
And sometimes they're more like Paul the Tavern Owner's.
"Look, there’s sure as hell demons. And maybe there is a God. I don’t know. Fine. But I’m not a hypocrite. I never prayed before and I ain’t starting now. If I go to hell, I’m going honest. How ‘bout you? "
Unlike Paul, I used to pray. I was once a devout Catholic. My father was a devout Catholic. He prayed. I'm not sure it did any good, but I'm not so arrogant that I'd 100% say it didn't.
The only thing I know for sure is this:
A benevolent, involved deity wouldn't allow its creations to suffer the way that so many of us do. If the deity is involved in our lives, I, like Stephen Fry, have but one thing to say to it:
How dare you!
How dare you let little children be molested and murdered. How dare you let there be wars. How dare you let my son's friend, who is only 18, get bone cancer. How dare you let my father struggle on for six years, losing his ability to control his body and his mind. How dare you give my aunt dementia. How dare you let Malcolm Young's mind be destroyed and force him to keep living in a terrified, bewildered state. How dare you allow all these things, and the countless other horrors? Seriously--how dare you!
I don't believe in the Church God. But in the event that he exists and hears what we say, that is what I have to say to him.
My final thought on the matter of heroes:
The church god actually used to be one of my heroes. I lost faith in him years ago.
~Cie~
