I've been consumed the last several days with heroism and what it is that makes a person a hero. There has been so much talk about heroes the past couple weeks. Firemen, police officers, rescue workers, soldiers now marching off to almost certain war, and ordinary people in everyday life that have sacrificed their lives so others would live, and those that sacrificed their lives to die along aside friends.

Being from the Vietnam generation, I'm not used to heroes. Oh, we had our sports heroes, but the superstars of baseball and football don't perform acts of heroism like we've seen over the past couple weeks or heroic feats we will come to learn about in the coming weeks and months by our military personnel. I guess a hero has courage, but I'm not sure what that is either.

Courage cannot be the absence of fear-that would be an idiot. I suspect a courageous person is filled with fear but overcomes it and moves forward to do what needs to be done. We look at the heroic acts of that person and say he or she is a hero. Are heroes made or born? My guess is they are not born, but made from circumstances existing at a given time and overcoming adversity in times of peril and strife, adapting, improvising when necessary and especially overcoming fear to make ultimate sacrifices for the good of, or to help, others, without regard to self.

So, my guess is we all have it in us to be heroes. With few exceptions, what parent wouldn't sacrifice his or her life for their child. That may be different though. It is an act of love that drives a parent to make this sacrifice. Yet, do some people love their country so much, or symbols like the American flag, or that which it stands for, to make the same sacrifice for people they don't even know? Maybe so! It could be some people act bravely out of self-preservation. More likely, I'd like to believe, protecting the American flag, the American way of life, is worth the sacrifice.

Freedom has exacted a very heavy cost over the 200 plus years of this nation. Foreign lands and seas drenched in American blood, and why: to protect a way of life known by no other country to this time in history. So maybe when we stand and react as heroes, it is like a parent protecting a child. If I make the sacrifice now, maybe my kid, or his/her kids, won't have to do it in the future.

I guess by protecting the country, our way of life, we are protecting our children by demonstrating love in a very real sense. So, can we all be heroes; I have no doubt we are all capable of overcoming fear to protect those we love the most. If we believe in democracy, then protecting the nation is really about protecting the people and especially the people we love the most. After all, the people are truly the government. Really, the United States is a government by the people, of the people and for the people-at least they tell us that and I still believe it. We are part of the American family.

If I take all the people I know, and those persons count in all the people they know, etc., we are all at some point interconnected with one another. So, to some little kid out there in Idaho I've never met, you are part of my family, the American family, so we will protect you and some of us will die for you because you are part of us and we love us collectively, and you individually. May God continue to bless the American people united as a family!