Heroes come in two varieties. There are life-long heroes: people who dedicate their whole life to a mission, to a cause, to sacrificing themselves – Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Gandhi, to mention a few. These are extraordinary individuals. Most people in the world who engage in heroic acts are [...] individuals who find themselves in a particular situation – one in which other people are looking the other way or continuing to perpetrate an evil behavior – and who, for some reason we don’t know, take heroic action. They do something to stop it – blow the whistle or otherwise challenge it in a direct way. That action is "heroic," even if the people are "ordinary." My sense is that the typical notion we have of heroes as super-stars, as super heroes, as Superman, and Batman, and Wonder Woman, gives us a false impression that being a hero means being able to do thing that none of us can actually accomplish. I want to argue just the opposite: that what we have to be doing more and more is cultivating the "heroic imagination" – especially in our children. The models of behavior that we want to give them are not rock stars, are not hip-hop artists, are not media celebrities or sports celebrities, – or even comic book heroes. Rather, it is the ordinary New York subway hero, Wesley Autrey, the 50-year old African-American construction worker who saved the life of a young man who had fallen on the train tracks from a seizure. While 75 others passively watched, he handed his two daughters over to a stranger and jumped down to save someone he did not know from death or dismemberment from and on coming subway. "I did what anyone would do, I did what everyone ought to do," were Autrey’s classic ordinary hero lines.