Time For Heroes

With the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks this weekend on our mind, and the President's jobs speech still resounding in our ears, we began to gather our thoughts for today's commentary. As we knew when we began this week, today's commentary would be about heroes.

As a cartoonist, Paul has drawn heroes and caricatures of heroes for years. Today, he's continuing a tradition that many of our friends in the cartooning and media business have been involved in for years: visiting real heroes, through Navy, Army, and USO programs.

The men and women that Paul and the other cartoonists are drawing for this week come from many different situations. Some are injured soldiers and sailors in hospital wards, while some are healthy service members stuck on long-term duty stations and ships, both here in America and abroad.

The cartoonists are doing what they can, to help their fellow Americans get through a tough time. They're taking pictures with the troops, drawing them and their friends, telling jokes - trying to help them get a breather from the daily grind of their lives. Some have major injuries. Many simply do the things that keep our armed services running smoothly, things that rarely garner public recognition. Yet they're heroes, each and every one.

If you ask almost any one of our living Medal of Honor recipients, they'll all say nearly the same thing: that they're not really heroes either. When they took out whole groups of enemies in insane firefights, they were just protecting their friends, their fellow Americans - their family by another name.

Many of the heroes of 9/11 would answer that question in much the same way, if we could ask them. The buildings were falling - but they were going to do the job, to the best of their abilities, do it all the way, until they couldn't anymore.

When we repeat the words of our web guru's granddad - that anything worth doing is worth doing well - THIS is what we mean by "doing well."

Our President - the President of EVERY American - once again was trying to do his job well when he spoke to Congress, and to every American citizen, Thursday night. He called on us to act on the most pressing crisis of our time, the jobs and economic crisis.

Mr. Obama laid out his plan, and he made it VERY clear that we will ALL be expected give up some things for the greater good of our nation. Excesses in Medicare WILL be examined. Corporations and the wealthy WILL pay more in taxes. And if we fail to help each other, it is all of us together that will have failed, not just him alone.

The President will put the details of his together bill by next Tuesday, and submit it to Congress. Then Congress will need to act - not next year, not in fourteen months. NOW. But it's not just up to them. We, the American people, will need to push Congress every step of the way, day after day.

Like some of the heroes that Paul and the cartoonists are visiting this week.

Being a hero isn't just something that can be spun into an exciting story, a Hollywood movie, or a great cartoon. Heroes include the kind of individuals who tear apart a ship, and retrofit it so that we can protect our country with better, safer, faster ships. It's grueling work sometimes, work that takes not just hours or weeks, but months and sometimes years of doing the same thing - and doing it well.

The actions of heroes aren't just a single moment or a single day - and they shouldn't be just a single day's events for any of us either.

The heroes of September 11th didn't just show up on September 9th and become members of the NYFD or NYPD. They took years to become heroes. Some of the heroes that have died since that day passed away due to weeks and months spent digging through the rubble. Day after day.

Now it's our turn. We are each faced with a fundamental choice: we can choose to accept the ideas put forth by President Obama to help our fellow Americans, or we can look no farther than political labels and automatically ignore the most pressing needs of our time. Some of these people, our family by another name, have been out of work or severely underemployed, through no fault of their own, for years. Ignoring them is no less neglectful and dishonorable an action than ignoring our soldiers who come home physically whole, but mentally and spiritually damaged.

Our fellow Americans need heroes.
It's time - long past time, actually - that we become the heroes we need.
It is time we did everything well. Every day. No exceptions.

No excuses.