To My Son’s Teacher, And All Those Ordinary Superheroes Saving Kids Today

Comic books have lied to all of us.

Heroism isn’t capes and costumes.

It doesn’t come from radioactive spider bites or metal suits or gamma rays or distant planets.

It isn’t tricked out all-terrain vehicles, gadget-laden utility belts, hammers from the heavens, or indestructible shields.

The real heroic stuff here on this planet is firmly seated in the chests of the ordinary people who embrace an extraordinary calling; those whose superhuman hearts beat quite differently than the rest of us mere mortals.

They rise before the sun does, and in the most counterintuitive fashion, they run directly, passionately, purposefully into the thick of the flourescent-lit fray—and they simply save children.

They do this not in a grand single bound, not in some last-second, desperate flurry of force; not in the bombast and fanfare of spectacle; but through steady, loving attention to a methodical, repetitive, mundane string of a million seemingly insignificant decisions, because they know how important each…