UNSUNG HEROES

Cavers have discovered 11,000 year old bear bones. That doesn't sound so difficult now, does it? However like so many things we don't know how to do,
it looks easy to the rest of us. From a BBC article, "Cave divers spent 12 years wriggling through narrow spaces and moving soil to unblock entrances in their effort to recover all that they could of the more recent discovery."

Unlike the Taliban, who blasted to two Buddhas to bits, or the Americans and Iraqis who allowed history back to biblical times to just be lost, destroyed or stolen, there are those who go out of their way to preserve history for those who will understand it better later and maybe even avoid the stupid things that mankind has done to date. Thirty years ago when men made an artificial scarcity of silver and boosted its price, thieves stole priceless Franklin silver pieces and many other antiquities and melted them down, never to be admired by humans again.

There are those who risk their lives to save animals and aquatic species from becoming extinct while constantly fighting those who to not have the foresight to see what is happening on our planet; that once lost can never be retrieved.

The definition of an unsung hero (heroine, if you wish) is: ' a person who makes a substantive yet unrecognized contribution; a person whose bravery is unknown or unacknowledged'. Humankind has seen many heroes but there are so many who live and die without recognition, either because people are oblivious to their contribution to the world, or they lived before our history and media. Today, our media is beyond celebrating real heroes. It is too into TV ratings because good deeds don't make money. How sad. I find them far more interesting than the liars who are celebrated now or the manufactured fights between important people.

What is most difficult in writing this blog is that they can't even be named or their work explicitly defined, nor pictures of them posted...they are truly unsung and unidentified....but we know they are there, or were by what works or tales about them were left behind...or learn too late that they once were! So much has been lost...sometimes not even the equivalent of the wheel can be reinvented.