Editorial: Train terror, a cop shooting and reminders of virtue, heroism

Many people strive for high ideals, and everywhere, there is heroism.

Max Ehrmann, "Desiderata"

People often think that, in an age when we'll consider everything from diving into the end zone for a great catch to coming into the office on weekends for some email cleanup to qualify as a heroic effort, the term has been diluted into insignificance. And if we concentrated on the encounters from Ferguson, Missouri, to Staten Island, New York, to Hempstead, Texas, and beyond, we could quickly come to the conclusion that citizens and authorities are more inclined toward confrontation than cooperation.

Then we have Lake Charles, Louisiana, and a high-speed train rushing across Belgium.

The latter case, of course, is garnering all the immediate publicity. There, on a train bound for Paris, passengers rose to the occasion when a man emerged brandishing box cutters, a pistol and a Kalashnikov automatic weapon.

It might not be entirely surprising that two of the passengers would intervene. Although on holiday, they had military training - an Oregon National Guardsman and a U.S. airman. But others were simple, everyday citizens - one, a friend of the military men, was a student-athlete at Sacramento State University; one was a French citizen who was the first to challenge the armed man; one was a British businessman. Their selfless actions likely saved scores if not hundreds of lives and the French government was quick to affirm their credentials for the title of hero by bestowing its highest civilian citation - the Legion of Honor.

The action in Louisiana Sunday was not so vast in scope, but it was no less remarkable. There, passers-by came upon a man who had just shot a state trooper responding to reports of an erratic driver and a pickup truck in a ditch. The passers-by, in the words of the head of Louisiana's state police, "jumped out, subdued him, grabbed the trooper's handcuffs and put them on the suspect."

All in a day's work, eh?

In his paean to optimism, "Desiderata," poet Max Ehrmann reminds us to be cautious and realistic about the evil in the world. There was on that train, after all, a man who appeared bent on mass murder and in that Louisiana ditch another with no apparent qualms about killing a police officer. "But," Ehrmann continues, "do not let this blind you to what virtue there is."

Indeed, our newspapers, television screens and social media comment fields overflow with terrifying images of evil and the acidic froth of vitriol. So much so, that we often may be tempted to disparage our species and our times. Thank goodness for those ever-present everyday people, including of course the officer who died doing his job, who emerge in every crisis to remind us of the true meaning of heroism and to warm our reflections on what virtue the world contains.