I am Sick of Oscars, Emmys, Gold Medals, Silver Medals, and all the other rewards that the high and mighty give to each other. I am sick of the celebrity roasts where the super stars tell each other how wonderful they are. We all bow down at the stars implanted in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We eulogize someone who runs the 100-meter dash in under 9 seconds. We drool over singers who have voices that would make angels weep. We fantasize life with a gorgeous actor or actress whose beauty makes us look positively bland. The celebrities of America have replaced the nobility of old Europe and Ancient Egypt.
I don’t deny that these people have talent or that they have worked hard at developing that talent. But many of these people are simply born with genes that the rest of us can only marvel at. No amount of practice in the world would be enough for Usain Bolt to become the fastest man alive. No amount of practice would be enough to make Pavarotti one of the greatest tenors who ever lived or Lise Davidsen one of the best sopranos in the world today. Many of our stars are so beautiful that it is incomprehensible to those of us with NORMAL genes that anyone could have the genes that Sydney Sweeney has ☹. There is a considerable amount of success simply built into the genes one has as well as the people you know. Who do you know that is on the 100 list of invitees to the Inaugural Ball? When was the last time you were invited to the Oscars or the Country Music Awards?
But what really burns me up is not the self-congratulatory escapades of the “Rich and Famous” or the masses worshipping at their altars. It is the total disdain and ignorance of the heroism and incredible feats of discipline and fortitude that most of us ignore because we are so blinded by the Broadway lights that flash on others. Let me give you one example of an unheralded human being to make what I am talking about more obvious.
A few years ago, the old Veteran Center in Eloy Arizona had a full-time director and coordinator. Her name was Sonnette Cherry. Sonnette was a dynamo. She organized events each month for the local veterans. She wrote grants to keep the center open. She found funding to take several disabled veterans to visit the Wall in Washington D.C. She liaised with other veteran centers in the area to insure that all vets had access to important information. She arranged for people from the VA in Tucson to come up regularly to talk about benefits and she scheduled Veteran Service officers to regularly help disabled veterans file for disability benefits.
In addition, she was always there if a veteran needed help either physically, emotionally or financially. Big Deal, you might say “She was only doing her job.” Yes that is true doing a job with low pay and long hours. However, in addition Sonnette was working on her Master’s degree at the University of Arizona and taking care of her 13 children. Could you manage that, or would you want to manage that? Sonnette never got a medal or an Oscar for doing her job though she certainly deserved one.
Now I point out this woman, not only because she is a friend but because she works hard (as many of you do) but like you will never get a medal or pin or celebrity honor for her work. She will get no star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame now will they have a special dinner in her honor at the White House. There are many other unheralded and unsung people like Sonnette out there doing a job that Usain Bolt or Sydney Sweeney would not touch in a million years.
I would like to see a People’s Award that every city would give regularly to people like Sonnette and YOU who work their butts off for other people and rarely get a mention. It would not be based on competition but simply given for doing good deeds. Sure, we see posters for Teachers and Doctors and Firefighters as “Hero’s” but those are generalizations. The vast majority of teachers (I have been one for 50 years now) will never be “Teacher of the Year” or receive any kind of an award.
The best awards I have ever received in my teaching career came from a few letters that I later received from students telling me what a difference I made in their lives. Believe me, these letters did not only make my day, but they also made my year. Nevertheless, I have wondered why I never received a single award or honor in my fifty years of public education. I have no doubt that this is true for the vast majority of those “Heroes” whose posters we put up on billboards.
It is high time, well beyond high time in fact, that we do more to honor people like Sonnette who have accomplished more than anyone scaling Mt. Everest or running the New York Marathon ever did. We are looking in the wrong direction for stars. Many of the stars are standing in our midst but we are so blinded by the aura of the stars manufactured by TV and the Media (We now have Internet Super-Stars) that we fail to see the stars in our own galaxy.
Look for a star today. I have named one that is in my orbit. I could have told you stories of many others, but you would have gotten bored or wondered if I was taking bribes 😊. I assure you that you know someone who goes above and beyond helping others all the while doing tasks that even Hercules would have run away from. Here are a few of my other “Heros” that I did not talk about. In reverse alphabetical order
- Evelia Zajac
- Darlene Tervo
- Louis Schultz
- Carol Salvatore
- K. Rice
- Karen Persico (My hard working and very caring wife)
- Gary McLean
- Socorro Luna Galusha
I could keep going through the entire alphabet, but this blog is already too long. Maybe you can start filling in where I left off.
publish their lists of the most beautiful people in the world. Beautiful people marry other beautiful people and are constantly in the news. The Kardashians would seem to have few talents except their almost incredible beauty. Rich men marry beautiful women. Beautiful actresses marry NFL football players. Beautiful heiresses marry rock stars while beautiful rock stars marry record producers.
I once asked my MBA students whether they would rather be smart or beautiful. They almost unanimously selected beautiful. I was very surprised but the more I have observed about life, the more it would seem that beauty will get you further than brains. Brains can get you some things but being nerdy is not one of the things that most people aspire to. Anti-intellectualism is a fact of American life as noted by Richard Hofstadter in his famous book: “Anti-intellectualism in American Life, 1963.”
As we both have aged, the process of deterioration taking place in our bodies is clear in the more wrinkled, wizened and paunchy body shapes we now exhibit. While neither of us was ever beautiful by societies standards, we never had any chance of making any top ten beautiful lists before and certainly not today. Nevertheless, when I see my spouse in her pajamas or in the shower or when she cuddles up in bed with me, I can’t help but think how beautiful she is and how much I love her. While I still see the shades of societies standards of beauty in the many young models punctuating my daily life, the beauty I see in my wife is something I cannot describe. It is a beauty that comes from who she is and not how she looks. I only know she is more beautiful to me today than she was 35 years ago when we first started dating.
You can claim as you grow older that you either have regrets or you have no regrets. I have had at least one friend who on his deathbed made the claim that he had no regrets. I admired his attitude very much. I wanted to emulate this attitude as I grew older, but try as I might it has escaped me. I can tell you I have no regrets, but it would be a big lie. I have enough regrets to write a book about. One of my regrets is that I am shorter than my father was. He was six feet four inches 
tall and I barely make five feet eight inches. Mostly though, I wonder what it would have been like to have been born handsome. To have had the looks of Paul Newman, Sean Connery, Brad Pitt or Robert Redford. Would I have used my looks to achieve fame and fortune or would I have simply squandered it away on wine, women and song? How much different would my life have been if I had been a “beautiful” person?
I understand and fully believe that like ingratitude, (Please read my blog on
Aging Capriciously 