lesmels

So you wanted to be a hero. Well, didn't everyone? But even when you were young you saw how hard being a hero was. That standing up for injustice, even small child-aged injustice, was a trying and ineffectual endeavor. A mere thimble against human error's entire factory of needles. In storybooks and dreams, heros occur as naturally as lightning through a series of inconceivable events, born by nature and swaddled in the rags of destiny. It is much harder to be a self-made hero. For this world operates by little more than the right to bear ownership, to build stocks or deplete them. It is a world of investment and exchange. No, you got to have the brass. Something to back you up when you take a stand. This is what they tell you.
So you set out to make your money, the dough to fix life's little game and deliver on stacked decks the bluffs no one else is calling. You go to college, the battle front of academia, and find that banality is unfitting for a hero, the hero you want to be. Society is set against you and no stroke of luck is fated for your ambitions. No potion will give you incredible strength or sun ray charge your flagging morals. It is not easy to be a humble hero, those with no authorship to claim them, whom are witnessed with the frequency and apathetic mores of bowel movements on daytime television; for humble heros wax small. They are the the folks who starve on meager wages to build up the destitute in quiet social-ordained offices conspired together by good intentions and beeswax. The buzzing is incessant in those little offices. The glass windows are roasted sugar water, trickling like sweat in the afternoon sun and streaked with the tongue smears of hungry illiterate children.
Thus, you and your heroic little mind must set out on something greater and perhaps you join the military. The shiny gold bars of rank seem a pleasing visual cue to the masses that your fight is a larger one, your virtues more disastrous. If I can just make it through this, you may say to yourself at night on the sterile cot that shelters your duffle, I can really make a difference somewhere. A permanent difference. A dying kind of difference. Only, you are a cog in the machine of cultural unawareness. You are the oxen unclear as to it's master's motives, tilling away at a soil you call home for lack of a better ideology. Here, you are contractually bound to be a hero and a swarm of heros share in all your triumphs.
Now you are truly bereft of ignition. Time has worn you away and mellowed your heroic averments. And also there is something else. A nagging voice that offers your own inner opposition; that heroism is beset by the same dull mental incontinence as cruelty. Heroism is another word for audacity and only audacious people can overlook it's vast accruement of inconsistencies, the vanities and minutiae of ruin it picks up along the road to achievement. You do what any good person who is not heroic would do. You pack your bags and seek the world, hoping if not to save it, then to rid yourself of guilt by sharing in it's troubles. You dip into a mire of half-invented darkness, imbibe with a naive palate the diluted ale of strife and loss, only to find it can be pleasurable to become intimate with the world. It has tricks in bed you never dreamed of. You return to wherever it is you came from and design new plans for the morning with the hope that revelations can be liars.
In the end, you will pick and choose your way amongst the baying fold, woofing and tweeting your mediocre advancements with every toe-step on a nonexistent threshold. With any luck you will never venture outside the ring of failure. Because in a world of leverages, debts, cut-backs, securities, roll-overs, insurance, and lotteries, it's all or nothing for you. Indeed, we hem a bitter edge with our thimble. Having nestled back into the rich waters of toil, you will swim upstream with the trout to breed. Perhaps you go back to college, hopefully find a job that doesn't grind you down too quickly, and maybe seek out a separate soul to share in some prevaricating mental easement. But at night you will wonder at yourself and the world. And you will tell your children, the future-world's hope, that they are already heros.
There is economy in such salvation.

This is all assuming that you do not plan on going into law. Please, don't kid yourself. Attorney's can't be heros.