Heroes?

So, a commercial airliner went down in the Hudson river this afternoon about forty blocks from my building. I'm on the tenth floor, with west-facing windows in the inner offices, so we all rushed into to the copy room to see what we could see. Not much, as it turned out; the taller buildings uptown completely obscured our sightline to the river. But there was an interesting little mini-drama to observe, as we watched a series of helicopters make their way back and forth from (presumably) the accident site back to (presumably) Saint Vincent's Hospital down on 7th & 12th. 

It was a welcome respite from an otherwise drudgingly slow day (which I can say without sounding like too much of a heartless bastard because it seems that everyone survived).  But it did lead to a little disagreement between myself and a colleague, as he read aloud from the initial news reports describing the "heroic" actions of the pilots, and I said something along the lines of "I don't know about heroic."  It just came out automatically; I wasn't trying to make a big point; in fact, I think I was trying to make a bit of a joke by pointing out what struck me as an obvious (and typically news-media-ish) absurdity. But my coworker looked at me like I was insane: "What are you talking about? They just saved all those people." I explained my reasoning to him, which he clearly didn't agree with at all, so I let the issue drop. But it did get me thinking about why what I'd said seemed so obvious to me, and why it didn't to him.

Like most people, I get a bit antsy when I fly. And I think the reason for that fear -- which is totally irrational, probability-wise -- is pretty much what everyone says it is: lack of control. The difference between being a passenger in an airplane and a driver in a car (a way riskier proposition, statistically speaking) is that when you're behind the wheel, you're in control. In an airplane, you're entirely at the mercy of the pilot -- if he/she fucks up, there's not a damn thing you can do about it. So when I'm in a plane and we start taking off, the thing I keep reminding myself is, a) the pilots don't want to crash any more than I do, and b) they have a realistic and functional understanding of how to prevent that from happening (it's my doubts about b that prevent the same logic from assuaging my fears when I'm a passenger in certain people's cars). 

But so here's where I came to my objection to the use of the word "hero" in this case.  My understanding of the definition of a "hero" is, roughly, "someone who puts him- or herself in harm's way for the benefit of other people." But in this case, the saving of the passengers is really just a byproduct of the pilots saving themselves.  It's a known phenomenon that you'll have the highest probability of surviving a catastrophic airline crash if you're seated at the rear of the plane; this is just simple physics (i.e., the design of an airplane is such that it "wants" to go down nose-first). So, realistically, there aren't many scenarios in which the pilots survive a crash and the passengers don't (unless there are some sort of ejector seats in the cockpit that the pilot's union has kept under wraps). 

And I don't know how much these semantic distinctions really matter; I'd certainly agree that the pilots are to be admired for their competence and apparent calm in extremely difficult circumstances. But I don't think that the watering down of these sorts of terms does us any favors -- and in fact, it seems to me that letting them pass unremarked upon kind of nurtures the environment that allows way more dangerous misuses of language. The (maybe too) obvious thing that springs to mind is 9/11, and the continued (in some quarters) references to the people who died in the World Trade Center as "heroes." Umm... how so? I'm not really a betting man, but I'd be willing to wager a substantial amount that most anyone who was given the option, on their way to work that morning, to die a hero or go home a (based on this logic, there's no getting around it) coward would have taken the day off. 

But more than that, it's worth keeping in mind that most any political figure that you might consider a "hero" (Obama most definitely included) is exercising their "heroism" in the pursuit of very self-serving goals (i.e., the gathering of personal power). Not to say that they're not also maybe helping a bunch of other people out, too. But the fact that there's another motive at work there should at the very least make you realize that your best chance of benefitting from any residual "heroism" is to put your interests in alignment with theirs; and, more importantly, that they may be turn out to be a whole lot less "heroic" if you decide to go a different way. And I'd put that on a rather different plane than, say, a Marine who puts himself in front of bullet while his buddies retreat. I just think that people who do things like that (and there are plenty of less-dramatic examples -- kidney donors come to mind for some reason) ought to have their own name. And we shouldn't just go passing it out like party favors. 

ADDENDUM 1/17:

So obviously the crash was all over the New York Times yesterday. I gotta say, the whole thing is pretty miraculous, which is a nice change of pace these days. And also, in light of the above I'd be kind of a dick for not pointing out the following bit of information from the article: "The plane's pilot [Chesley B. Sullenberger] walked the isles of the cabin twice to ensure no one was left behind before he exited." 

See, now that's heroic.