Why we kiss so many frogs?

     A few years ago the administrators of the Barron Prize for Young Heroes polled American teenagers to name their heroes. Superman and Spider man were named twice as often as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Abraham Lincoln. Rosa Parks wasn’t even mentioned. More than half named an athlete, a movie star, or a musician. One in ten named winners on American Idol as heroes and yes, Britney Spears was listed as a hero by some of our teenagers.

     On a separate event, not too long ago, the world witnessed the royal wedding of Prince William to a common girl next door, Kate Middleton. There was so much media coverage and public attention that one could not help but to be exposed to it. I think the royal wedding received more media coverage than any other major event since royal wedding of Prince Charles to another common girl, Diana. I wondered what created this much attention to these particular royal wedding? Why were we so fascinated by it? It couldn’t have been because of lifelong accomplishments of either William or Kate. Individually, neither one of them possesses any special characteristics that makes them special. The question is not whether it was all just another grand spectacle for public. The real question is why? Why do we love fairy tale and bed-time stories and believe in them over & over again? Why do women have such tendency to believe in prince charming?

Looking for prince charming is just another branch of our obsession with fictional bigger than life characters. I wondered:

• Why do we even need to look up to other men as heroes? 
• Why do we have a tendency to believe in “knight in shining armor” or other fictional heroes?
• Knowing very well that they are fictional, why so many of us substitute real heroes with comic book or fairy tale characters?

As children we learn partly by modeling others. So we start out idealizing our parents and ultimately along the way they (being just another flawed human) disappoint us in some ways. Other significant people in our life also eventually end up not living to our unrealistic childhood super human expectations.
 

As adults, believing in heroes, allows us to recapture that earlier time when we had this exquisite connection with our initial heroes, our parents without the disappointment part. The early model of a “bigger than life super human hero” goes back to Ancient Greek. Wikipedia defines a hero as:  “person, typically a man, who is admired for courage or noble qualities”. Greeks separated heroes  from ordinary people by making them divine or semi-divine. The Greek term for hero literally meant  someone who was semi-divine and born from one mortal and one divine parent.

Unfortunately, motion picture industry has come a long way since its early days of special effects. Thanks to computer Generated Imagery (CGI) and 3D technology, entertainment industry has  mastered the art of visual illusion. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for our sub consciousness to  separate real from fiction these days. This repeated exposure to alternate reality will eventually (if not already) dissolve the line between real & fiction all together. Public extravagant exhibition of royal wedding and other so called reality shows such as “Bachelor” and many others alike further solidify the believe in our children brain that fairy tale can happen to any of us if we just believe hard enough. That’s usually when frogs begin to look a lot like a Prince-in-Disguise. That’s when believing in fairy tale overcomes our common sense.

That’s when we start believing that ordinary flawed people such as Tiger wood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Berry Bond, and many others are more divine than the rest of us. Our relationship with these perfect princes and divine heroes is built on unrealistic expectations. We put them up on high pedestals even though we don’t really know them except through the eyes of camera. It would be a matter of time before they exhibit human like behavior and self-destruct since their real-life persona is often very much in contrast to their public image.

The best antidote to this phenomenon is to teach our children to become accepting of the limits of human nature. Washington and Jefferson held slaves; Martin Luther King was accused of philandering and plagiarizing, just countless others have had sex with someone they shouldn't, and so on. We need to choose heroes that are real separate out the things that make our heroes noteworthy, and forgive the shortcomings that blemish their heroic perfection. True, the false steps and frailties of heroic people make them more like us, and since most of us are not particularly heroic, that may seem to reduce the heroes' stature. But this dynamic pulls in the other direction as well: these magnificent spirits, these noble souls, amazingly, they are like us, they are human too. And perhaps, then, what was possible for them is possible for us. They stumbled, they wavered, they made fools of themselves - but nonetheless they rose and accomplished deeds of triumphant beauty. Perhaps we might do so too. Believing in fairy tale and divine heroes is too often just an excuse for sparing ourselves the effort.