I’m sure you read yesterday about the man in New York who risked his life to save a man who fell onto the subway tracks — a selfless, heroic act, indeed.
But what happens after a person becomes a hero? In this media-saturated world, producers are on a never-ending quest for novelty, and they pounce immediately. From today’s Washington Post:
Local news picked up the incident almost immediately.
In the subway and in the street near the station in Harlem where the incident occurred, people called out hello, shook his hand, held him. “You a hero,” said one man. As he walked to his mother’s apartment, a stranger pressed $10 in his hand.
His mother’s comfortable home was a giddy war room. Autrey’s sisters kept track of appointments. Media crews filed in and out. The phone rang constantly.
Autrey had just come back from a celebratory dinner and tried on his new black quilted jacket from the New York Film Academy, the school attended by Cameron Hollopeter, the 20-year-old who had suffered the seizure and was still being evaluated in a hospital Thursday. The academy also offered him a $5,000 check.
He had spent much of the day on the subway platform reenacting events at the behest of various television and newspaper crews. One tabloid reporter asked him to don a Superman suit and stand on the platform for a picture. He declined.
… On Thursday he had an interview with CNN and did the morning talk shows. He traveled in a limousine to meet with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
In the Blue Room at City Hall, Bloomberg suggested Autrey might run for mayor, or even president, and awarded him the Bronze Medallion for civic achievement, which has been awarded to Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali.
A Walt Disney Co. executive offered an all-expense-paid trip to Disneyland in California. Autrey said Trump was going to give him a check for $10,000 after the news conference.
“What I did is something that every New Yorker should do. If you see somebody in distress, do the right thing. Help out. Okay?”
Autrey left City Hall in a cloud of confusion. Reporters pigeonholed his 6-year-old daughter; his sister wanted to talk privately; no one could find the address of Trump’s office.
“I need my privacy ’cause I’m not used to this,” he said. “I don’t know how superstars deal.”
Either way I look at it, I’m cynical. It could be the voracious appetite of the 24-hour media; or it could be that we as a people are so desperately in need of heroes these days that when we find one, we will devour him.
