Heros

I watched the movie tonight about Irena Sendler. She was a social worker in poland who secreted something like 2500 jewish children to safety. The movie made me cry so many times. And it got me thinking. 

There doesn't seem to be room for that sort of hero in the world anymore. Instead of smuggling children to safety, we have places in the world where children are stolen to the sex trade. Babies are abandoned for the crime of being female. Little girls in africa are gang raped because the men doing it think sex with a virgin cures HIV. Rape is also used as a weapon of war in the Darfor region. Children of both genders are forced to join militas. 

I don't mean to get my (3?) readers down. But I wonder what has happened to the world in the past seventy years or so. In the western world we have unimaginable wealth, health care, social networks to protect those who fall, Television, entertainment 24/7 available at the press of a few buttons. And in the undevelpled world, monstrous acts are common occurances. Children starve to death at impossible rates. And we sit around complaining there isn't anyting on TV and order pizza because we are too lazy to cook something. 

I guess this is my own middle class guilt coming out. Evil exsists in the world. And in the first part of the last century it got a foothold in europe, enough so that it threatened the whole world. And heros rose up, both as part of the military fighting and as part of the civilains living in the midst of it. 

Now we have evil in other parts of the world. But where are the heros? Where are the local people taking a stand against it? Why are we all so helpless now?