Walking through the streets of London, one cannot go far without encountering a bronze shrine of a past hero - a gentlemen of the old guard who fought whether by might or intellect to shape the country. Perhaps as a woman, unable to see an accurate reflection of myself in these heroes past, I can't help but question whether the tradition of revering them should in itself be a thing of the past. I don't mean to say we can't respect and seek to understand those great individuals who have shaped the world before we came to live in it. History is at times repeated and it is good to know how the past gave rise to our current and future circumstances. However, I would venture to say that we should not ask of humankind that heroes themselves be repeated in the same way as history.
To revere the past hero as the penultimate aspiration - the epitome of greatness, is to uphold a depiction of the past into the future. In doing so, are we not causing a time continuum of sorts? A situation where in order to shape the face of a modern day hero we must continually look to the past to iterate on those who came before us? Doesn't the act of reverence in a way, even if with just a gentle tug upon the mind, set us up to believe that the face of our future heroes must appear with some modest likeness of those who came before? Is that not why great outcries go up when a modern hero emerges who is not like the great bronze man of the past and is instead, a true depiction of what the future could hold?
These bronze heroes -
Epitomes of power and authority.
See the faces of history.
Charging forward one must not pause to look back.
