Are you a hero?

Really, it is your choice. Heroes are do not have to be the smartest, nor do they not have to be the strongest. Heroes do not have to even be healthy. Heroes just have to be committed. Committed to working for the common good beyond any rational expectation of personal payback. Heroes work for more than personal gain. Heroes work for the community as a whole! Are you an everyday hero? You can be!

And in this time of so many stories not told, I think that just telling the untold stories is a heroic act. While people should put forth their best writing, the writing does not have be ready to be published in the New York Times. In fact, our own voices and our own storytelling style is in many ways better. The mass market newspapers do not understand that people have stopped buying their papers because those newspapers have stopped telling the news. Why should I pay someone to lie to me? For example, my article telling you about the deteriorating quality of Minnesota roads is a story not told in mainstream media. So we really need heroic citizen journalists. And here is a place that you can become a citizen journalist. Everyone can sign up and write progressive green political stories as diaries. No swearing. We, the editors, do editing and the front paging of stories.

If you can't write, then send us tips. If you can afford to contribute in paying the expenses of maintaining this site, that really helps. If you read and spread the word, you are truly helping in every way. If you simply comment on a good job, you help us keep our spirits up. You the reader are an important part of the heroic team of telling the real news.

The boiling frog story states that a frog can be boiled alive if the water is heated slowly enough — it is said that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never jump out.

The story is generally told in a figurative context, with the upshot being that people should make themselves aware of gradual change lest they suffer a catastrophic loss...
"This is not an experiment I wish to commend, but it has lessons for another animal—ourselves. If drastic change takes place abruptly, we notice and react to it. If it takes place gradually, over a few generations, we are hardly aware of it, and by the time that we are ready to react, it can be too late."...

Al Gore uses the analogy in his presentations and the movie An Inconvenient Truth to describe people's ignorance towards the issue of global warming. It is extremely common in books about business, economics, and marketing to illustrate the idea that change needs to be gradual if it is to be accepted, and as a warning against being slowly "boiled" in one's job.
(wiki)

Basically, as a historian, I see so many ways that our civil rights and the information that we get has been changed. I think that if a person went directly from the 1960s to now, that they would would be in deep horror at how our government has changed and how we accept "big brother". George Orwell's book "1984" was meant to be a horror story, not as a manual for the Republican party.

In the changes that happen, basically each one of us has to allow this to happen. Even a designer has learned that we too are what we agree to do. For if we are not paying attention then incrementally we can allow horrors like Sobibor, like our own "extraordinary rendition" where we can do torture as long as we "outsource" it.

Basically I think ordinary people like you and I are the ones to make the difference.

So do you have it in you? Are you a hero?