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.
Open source software maintainers, thanklessly (and often without pay) maintaining infrastructure without which the global economy would collapse immediately
I second this, big time.
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!
Bernie Sanders would be my first thought
Mine too
Any garbage man that picks up my trash. Any sanitation engineer that cleans my sewage.
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.
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).
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.
Alexandra Elbakyan (Scihub) has probably done more for scientific progress than anyone alive.
Richard Stallman
I was so keen to hear everyone else’s that I forgot to put my own! In no particular order:
- Mick Lynch (standing up to the system)
- Yanis Varoufakis (for a new system and for insight into the current one)
- Edward Snowden (for his principles and courage and lifting the lid)
- Satish Kumar (for his wholism and his ability to inspire with hope and goodness)
- Tyson Fury (in his almost mythical resurrection against Deontay Wilder and his retelling of the fight. Someone needs to use it as narration for animated film for children.
- Will edit if more come to mind!
Greta Tintin Thunberg
Huh. Cannot unseen.
Still Noam Chomsky, David Graeber (rip). Prof Michael Hudson, Prof Danny Dorling, Grace Blakely, Michael Sheen, Mick Lynch, Dianne Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn, Alexi Sayle, Rutger Bergman, Thic Naht Han (rip), Matieu Ricard, bob Marley, , and the countless comrades on the front lines of the fight for equality And protection of the environment
Honourable mentions:
Jolyon Maugham, Aaron Bastani, Marcus rashford, burning spear, Peter Geohagan, Ian hislop, chuck D, killah Mike .
Actually, I’m pretty sure the main character of real life is a girl I know. Unfortunately, revealing infos about her at this point might he harmful to the plot.
Shawn Fain
