Who are the heroes of our time? Who is driving us to a better future? And who is inspiring and guiding us?
Anything goes: famous people, people in your own life, fictional people who represent something to your culture, groups of people working behind the scenes etc.
The only rule is they must be current.
EMS ; chronically underpaid and overstressed.
When a cop complains about the terrible things they see on their job, they are talking about the stuff the saw watching EMS work.
This. “Overstressed” doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s an unimaginably stressful job even when things are going right.
Under appreciated movie from the 1980s, “Repo Man.”
Harry Dean Stanton tells Emilio Estevez “I hate normal people. Normal people spend their whole damn lives trying to avoid tense situations. Repo man spends his whole life putting himself into tense situations.”
Well, I do have a PTSD diagnosis… but, still on the road. Love it!
Any garbage man that picks up my trash. Any sanitation engineer that cleans my sewage.
Bernie Sanders would be my first thought
Mine too
The transgender population, especially transgender youth. If one group’s rights can be stripped away, then any group’s can. They are the front line soldiers against the spread of fascism.
The kids protesting on campuses right now.
Yes
Teachers. It is such a widely known trope that teachers are overworked and underpaid. So many that want to pursue teaching now enter the market, understanding that they will likely need a second job at some point. Although internet kudos do little to actually address the problem, my respect goes to the teachers.
not in any specific order:
SPI, the foundation supporting debian and arch projects.
boeing whistleblowers, and anybody willing to step up against these kinds of corpo shenanigans.
people who wear masks.
stephen colbert, john oliver and their news team
lemmy posters
Stephen Hawking.
He has influenced how physicists look at the world, and they in turn have taught us how to see the world, and nearly everybody believes what he has told (even though some of the topics do not fit with newer observations anymore, but still nobody has come up with really better explanations).
For me personally, Cory Doctorow. Here’s an inspiring talk by him.
That guy’s a good egg, and a pretty good author too
Kind of on the tail end of their careers, but Senator Ron Wyden on privacy/surveillance, and Bernie Sanders on most stuff. Good question for a thread.
EMS, the scientists who made the vaccines which have prevented millions of deaths from COVID, and the mothers who are making the effort to raise up their kids to be the best people they can be.
It makes me sad David Attenborough has this world in his later years rather than the one he fought for. But without he how much worse would it be.
Greta Tintin Thunberg
Richard Stallman
I would’ve said the same some years ago, but then I actually went to a lecture by him in person at my university and… I’ll just say that it was not a very pleasant experience and very much a “never meet your heroes” kind of moment.
Oh dear, what happened?!
I don’t know how accurate each of the claims in this article are, but this is the kind of stuff that he’s been accused of, and as a result most people don’t really worship or admire him much anymore: https://www.wired.com/story/richard-stallman-and-the-fall-of-the-clueless-nerd/
On a personal level he does seem like bit of an odious character. Even some of his behaviour in talks I’ve seen on youtube. I think in his case it’s what he represents that makes him heroic.
Shawn Fain
