Heroism at a moment's notice

You hear gunshots. You look in the direction of the sound and see people scattering. Your attention is now focused on what you are sure is a developing crisis that could soon envelop you. Such a crisis is by its very nature unpredictable. A school shooting. The Nairobi mall siege. Brutal workplace violence. A structural collapse that traps people in need of your help.

It is times like these when moral relativism evaporates and indisputable good character shines. Bravery. Selfless concern for others. Decisiveness and resourcefulness.

On a sunny fall Wednesday morning, people were strolling on Parliament Hill in Canada’s capital city—tourists and civil servants—when they heard shots from the nearby War Memorial. After a small car pulled up and a gunman emerged from the driver’s side, security cameras show men with briefcases dashing away in fright. Who can blame them? They have families and responsibilities. And getting shot is rumored to be extremely unpleasant.

But heroes do what we don’t expect. They see the duty we owe our neighbors and follow it without regard to personal safety. They intuitively know and reflexively do what is right. Tackle this gunman? Most people wouldn’t step out in this way, but almost everyone admires those who do. It’s rare, so it’s precious. It’s extraordinary but still human, so we call it virtue.

Heroes are as unexpected as the crises they address. Sometimes they’re just part of the crowd. You couldn’t pick them out. Folks who slowed their escape from the Twin Towers on 9/11, or never escaped at all, because they stopped to help the infirm and the trapped. The “Subway Superman” who threw himself on the subway tracks to save a fallen fellow traveler from an oncoming train. Others act admirably in their official callings. “Sully” Sullenberger landed a passenger jet in the Hudson River and walked through the flooding cabin checking for stragglers. In Ottawa, Kevin Vickers, the sergeant-at-arms for the House of Commons, sprang suddenly from the routines of an ordinary day to shoot dead an assailant who was gunning his way through Parliament’s Hall of Honour.

Have you stood before the hero’s platform and shrunk from ascending, saying to yourself, “I don’t want to get involved,” or, “It’s not my business,” or, “If I lay low this will pass me by”? Perhaps there was really nothing you could do. It was not your platform at all. Or perhaps there was, but you didn’t. You will live with that knowledge all your days, the knowledge that virtue failed you, or that you failed to give virtue its proper attention in the stretch of life leading up to what should have been its finest hour.

Heroes are formed when the seedling of moral character is being nurtured in the home, in the church, on the playing field, and between the covers of wonderful books, because it springs from one’s moral core. But it’s never too late to start.