Utah Phillips & Ani DiFranco Follow

ask a kid "who are your heroes?"

chances are they'll give you the names of made-up people. uh-huh.

HE-MAN. Barbie.

and i don't understand it about heroes, it really bothers me…

what happened to the time when heroes were flesh-and-blood people?

you know, people like Emma Goldman or Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
or Mother Jones or BIg Bill Haywood ...or Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio. and great boxers, you know, Joe Louis. Grandparents! what's wrong with your grandparents being heroes?

see, my mother -she worked for the CIO, was a labor organizer- and she made sure that we had appropriate heroes. flesh-and-blood people.

she would clip columns out of 'the cleveland plain dealer' -a good labor paper in its day- paste 'em in scrapbooks. we could take it to school to share with our kids at the equivalent of show-and-tell. the scrapbooks were mainly full of clippings about
bank-robbers.

she seemed to favor bank-robbers. called 'em 'class heroes'.

didn't understand at the time what she meant.
i do now.