Somebody whistles next to me.  “Wow.  I look at it now, and that really shoulda hurt, but I don’t remember feeling a thing.”  Lenny Gransen was a real asshole, but he was my kind of asshole.  We struck sparks the moment we met, and kept digging at each other till the friendship couldn’t have been dug out with a jackhammer and the entire 137th engineer’s corps.  He was talking about the hole in his head – the one that had gone right through his helmet and made an exit out the back of his skull big enough I could have stuck my hand in there.

“I’m a little busy right this minute, Lenny,” I heard myself growl, as I sighted down my Thompson’s sites at a flicker of movement through the smoke.  Shit.  If I hadn’t been frightened enough at the battle raging around me to damn near piss myself, I’d never have made the mistake of-

“Wait – you heard me say that?”

Yeah, that’s right.  The dead talk to me.  Sometimes, I talk back – or at least I used to, before I realized just how much trouble it causes me.  Still, you can’t do something most of your life and not develop a reflex to keep doing it.  It’s sort of a family tradition, you might say, and big fucking genius me, I decided to become a soldier when I grew up.  Because, y’know, not like there’s any dead people to be found on the goddamn slaughterhouse battlefields of Europe.  Join the army, see the world, and watch entire fucking battalions head off down the Tunnel.

A shift in the wind finally blew enough smoke outta my way to make out the movement I’d seen earlier, a trio of German infantry trying to flank around the edge of my unit in the battle haze.  The lead guy saw me about half a second after my first burst of fire took him in the shoulder; the other two dropped still trying to bring their rifles to bear on me.  Grimacing, I ducked back down in the bomb crater Lenny and I had sheltered in, before the sniper that had done him in could make us a matched set.

“Damn it Travis, answer me!”  The trouble with being able to talk to the dead is that if they realize you can do it, they get damn impatient if you keep trying to ignore them.  I glared at the big man.

“Yeah, I can hear you,” I growled at him.  It was bad enough when somebody I’d never met before realized I’d heard something they’d said, sometimes weeks or even years after they’d died.  Friends, family?  They were worse.  “But if you don’t mind-”

“Perry, Gransen, get some fucking fire on that goddamn bunker before they cut down the entire unit!”  The voice was my lieutenant, Everett Dunn, carrying over the throaty roar of a pair of MG08′s.  Lenny and I had been trying to circle around on the pillbox that had our unit pinned down when he’d had his ticket punched.  I peeked back over the edge of my bomb crater at the looming structure, and ducked fast as one of the gunners immediately swung toward me, a line of dirt sprays tracing a line straight toward my head.

Being able to talk to the dead does have one or two advantages on the battlefield.  “Look, do me a favor and look around out there, see if there’s another crater I can scramble to,” I said.

“What, you think I’m section 8?  Those 08′s ‘id cut me right in…,” he trailed off, his eyes falling on his own corpse, as I pulled his grenades, spare ammo and the explosives satchel he’d been carrying from the body.  “Oh…  right.”

“Yeah, right,” I muttered.

Main Features

• Fully user configurable:
• User defines sets of extra field IDs along with a set name and a header text in the plugin’s configuration.
• User can chose to use either a basic div element for output, or an HTML5 compatible aside element for standards compliance.
• User can set CSS class names for floating Blocs to left or right.
• Unstyled CSS markup:
• Values are displayed in a definition list based format.
• All elements have a completely unstyled CSS class applied reflecting their role in the display.
• Simple shortcode syntax:
• Blocs are added to the K2 article’s content through the use of an easy to remember shortcode.
• QuickBlocs:
• In addition to pre-made sets of data pulled from the article’s extra fields, the plugin can also create display boxes using values supplied in the shortcode itself.
• Doesn’t effect the normal display of extra field content.
• The plugin only reads values from the article’s extra fields – it doesn’t remove any of that data, so K2’s regular extra field display will still work perfectly.

Now, myself, I don’t have kids.  I doubt that I ever will, and in any case, I find that the older I get, the less I can stand being around them.  It’s not that there’s really anything wrong with children, mind you.  Children can be a great joy and blessing… just not when they’re within earshot of me.  I dunno what it is, but what most people find cute, adorable and innocent about children, especially young children, I tend to find annoying, obnoxious, and NOISY!!  It’s a clash of personalities, really, mine versus the fact that most children just haven’t matured enough to have one.  They’re still growing, they have to try out every possible way to drive you insane, rather than just working on perfecting a few particularly well honed skills.

Still, I do find myself thinking about what I might say or do for my hypothetical children should I ever find myself with one or six.  Parenthood has to start somewhere, and if you wait until the bun is baking in the oven, you’re already way behind – at least, that’s the way I’ve always felt.  You want to have hopes and dreams for your 3.whatever children, but there’s some practical thinking that needs to be done too, right?

I suppose it’s that writer’s mind of mine again, always churning away, always making something boil over on the back burner.  Sometimes I think it’d be nice if I could turn the knob down from “high” back there, but unfortunately my skull didn’t come equipped with temperature dials.

Anyway, like I said, the topic of bullying has been coming up a lot lately, and I keep hearing parents saying pretty much the same thing, over and over.  They don’t want their children to fight.  They expect the teachers to stop it.  The school districts need to do more to prevent bullying.  The kids should just ignore it, because the bullies are just sad, unloved people that want attention.

You know what I’ve noticed, though?  Nobody seems to want to be the one to say, “Stop.”  Bullies survive on one very simple principle, the simple fact that nobody is willing to stand up to them and make them stop.  The schools most certainly don’t want to do it.  What’s that, you fascist teacher, you dare to tell my little Johnny to stop pestering that fat kid?  It’s not your job to raise my little Johnny!  It’s just a little harmless teasing, you leave him alone or I’ll see to it your teaching license is revoked and you up on charges for abusing my little Johnny’s rights!!  Parents don’t want to do it because no parent wants to believe their little bundle of joy could be anything other than perfect.

Back here in the real world, though, the bullies trundle merrily along, stealing lunch money and generally making the world hell for those that don’t know how to stand up for themselves.  I dealt with my share of them when I was a kid, and I can’t say that I always handled them perfectly.  I made my mistakes, but I had some victories too, and that’s something to draw from.  But what would I tell my hypothetical child, based on those experiences?

After thinking about it for awhile, I’ve come up with something I think I’d be comfortable telling my kids.  The first thing I’d tell them is that I expected them to exhaust every option they had for ending the conflict peacefully.  That means telling the bully to stop in no uncertain terms, that means reporting the problem to teachers or the school police liaison if needs be, that means telling me so that I can call the school and make my concerns known.

Sometimes, though, there’s just no ending a conflict peacefully.  I learned that for myself, after all, and I learned it the hard way, so, there’s something else I’d tell my child.  I’d tell them that if all else failed – if diplomacy didn’t work, if the teachers wouldn’t step in, if the pressure of an angry parent wasn’t enough…  I’d tell them that they had my permission and blessing to stand up and make a fight of it, if that’s what they really felt was needed to put an end to it.  There’s a catch, though, as I hear gasps at the idea of using physical violence to fight violence.  There’s a big catch.

You see, what I learned, dealing with my own bullies, is that sometimes the only option you have left is to turn that cold shoulder, ball your hand into a fist, and give the bully a black eye that can be seen from half a block away.  And I had to do it more than a couple times before the bullies finally got the hint that trying to push me around, in the long run, was only going to wind up hurting them – literally.  However, I also walked straight to the admin office each time, and turned myself in for my punishment, because fighting does mean getting a punishment.

That’s what I’d tell my children, too.  If they honestly and truly felt that was the only way, then they could… but that they would have to stand and accept the consequences too.  If that meant that I would have to take a day or a week off from work to stay with them while they served an out of school suspension, well, guess what?  That’s my job.  I’m a parent, and it’s my JOB, and my privilege to raise my children right, and to make sure that they’re properly disciplined if they do something wrong.  I’d look their teacher or their principal right in the eye and tell them the exact same thing, too, and one more thing…  That I couldn’t be more proud of my children for saying enough and defending themselves after exhausting the “right” options if I tried. 

In an ideal world, bullies just wouldn’t exist.  It’d never enter our minds that we could gain power by tormenting those around us.  Unfortunately, as most have noticed, this is far from an ideal world, and honestly, I’m not sure I’d want to live in an ideal world anyway.  In this world, bullies are here to stay… but that doesn’t mean we all couldn’t do a better job of telling them to stop.  Maybe that means I tread on the toes of their parents, the ones that are too busy complaining about others raising their children to actually raise their children.  Maybe that means my children have to resort to turning the tables on the bully and giving them a taste of their own medicine.

Food for thought.

Well, maybe not.  The movie really kinda got me thinking about the nature of a hero, in a sort of back of my head kind of way.  What really is a hero?  When we’re kids, we’re all taught that the heroes are easy to find.  They were the police, the firemen (and women!) that are out there to keep us safe.  They shouldn’t have to be out there.  In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need police, we wouldn’t need firefighters.  Their families shouldn’t have to be afraid that one day, instead of their loved ones coming home, it’ll be a knock on the door from a sober-faced partner or colleague to tell them that they’ve gone home for the last time.  Yet, there they are, every day, because that’s what they’ve chosen to do.

In Backdraft, Kurt Russell had a great line.

It used to be real clear.  When I was a kid, what meant most to me about this job was… no “ifs”.  Somebody called the fire department, we came.  We just showed up.

Think about what that really means for a moment, what the underlying statement is.  These people are out there for us, to risk their lives for us, and it doesn’t matter who you are.  If you call the fire department, they come.  If you call the police, they come.  They just show up.  It was so easy, to be a kid.  You knew who the heroes were.  You knew that all you had to do to get them was dial three numbers on your phone, and they’d come.  That’s why every little child wants to be a policeman, or a firefighter when they grow up, because they want to be heroes too.

But they’re not all heroes, are they?  No, you learned that when you got older.  In fact, the older you got, the more you started to realize that they were human, just like you.  If a cop can be a bad guy, if a firefighter can be an arsonist, if they’re both really just human, then they can’t really be heroes, right?  Who could you look to as a hero then?  It used to be real clear, but not anymore.

Some of us found new heroes as we got a bit older.  We found characters that represented the ideals that the police and firefighters were supposed to be, but weren’t always.  Characters were better, right?  Characters from comics and cartoons and video games and storybooks.  Optimus Prime, Duke, Voltron, Link, Batman, Superman.  They’re real heroes.  They stand up and fight against the bad guys, they inspire those around them.  They never, ever quit, no matter how bad the situation looked, because as long as they didn’t give up they’d always win in the end.  They were heroes, bright, shining, and infallible, ideals that couldn’t be tarnished…

…Only they could be.  Optimus Prime, that virtuous, honorable red knight… died.  He didn’t just die, he was killed by Megatron, his arch nemesis, the worst bad guy of that universe.  That couldn’t be right.  The bad guys never beat the heroes, right?  Only it happened again to Duke.  Serpentor put a snake through his heart.  Batman walks a razor-thin line between good and evil… and he’s stumbled more than once.  Superman can be tricked, and brainwashed into fighting for the enemy.  Once again, we got older, and our heroes were blemished, lost some of their shining example, only this time it was even worse, because these were characters that weren’t supposed to have those human fallibilities.

But maybe because we were older… maybe because we’d seen it before, or maybe because we’d started to learn that the world is one made of colors, not just black and white, they didn’t fall.  Not completely.  Batman had darkness in him, about him… but he still never gave up, and while he’d stumbled, he’d never quite crossed the line.  Optimus was dead – at least until the toy companies realized what a mistake they’d made – but his example survived him.  The ideal was still alive, still there to draw from.

It was an important lesson to learn.  I learned it through the example of fictional characters, but that doesn’t make the lesson any less valid.  Heroes aren’t always spotless, untarnished, pure.  Sometimes, they’re just as grimy as the rest of us.  All too often, they’re not really thought of as heroes until they’re dead.  But it still wasn’t the full answer, just part of it.  Just a glimpse into the nature of a hero.

More years passed, and we matured.  We learned what a hero was supposed to be according to literature courses in school and television shows at home.  They were crime-solving super-sleuths, country lawyers who always defended the innocent, mystery writers with a knack for piecing together clues.  They were space station captains willing to take a stand against a corrupt government in order to safeguard the lives of the civilians on their stations, and starship captains willing to boldly go.  They were suave secret agents fast with their guns and faster with the women, and cowboys that’d stare down the barrel of a Colt 45 and smile, then ride off into the sunset after winning the day.  They’re surgeons serving mere miles from the frontline, struggling to hold onto their sanity while sewing young men back together to save their lives – and not always succeeding in either goal.

There’s a unifying theme to all these examples, though, and it’s one that’s taken me thirty years to really acknowledge.  It wasn’t until the end of Battle: Los Angeles that it finally, truly crystalized in my mind.  It’s still not a complete answer as to the nature of a hero, but I think it’s closer than I’ve ever come.  You see, at the end of Battle: Los Angeles, the surviving members of the unit manage to make it out of the city alive.  They’ve done the impossible, and given the military a fighting chance at turning the tides, and the commanding officer of the base tells them to get some rest, and get some hot foot and hot showers.  All the Marines at the base know who they are, and they look at the members of the unit with the sort of awe that you only get from a hero’s inspiration.

Instead of eating, though, instead of standing down and taking a well earned rest… they rearm.  They’ve been fighting for almost 24 hours straight, they’ve lost friends, they’re battered, bloody, and exhausted… but slowly, they refill their clips, pass around grenades, gather fresh supplies.  They didn’t talk about it, didn’t agree that they had to go back out there, there was no moving speech… they just got rearmed, then headed right back into the fight.

It wasn’t heroics, not an application of Big Damn Heroes or any other trope save a Crowning Moment of Awesome.  The realization stunned me.  The survivors of the rescue operation weren’t trying to be heroes.  They’d done the job that they’d been assigned to, and then they’d gone above and beyond the call of duty by risking their lives to turn the tide of the fight.  Not a single person in that camp, in the world, would have blamed them if they’d stood down like they’d been ordered to, because they’d already done their job.

They went back out there because it was the only thing they could do, not because it was what they had to do.  They’re heroes because they couldn’t stand aside and let somebody else do it for them.  They’re heroes because they didn’t have to go, and they went anyway.  The nature of a hero isn’t just doing what you have to do, it’s doing what you can do.  That’s why police and firefighters are still heroes even though they’re fallible, that’s why Batman can stumble but still carry on the fight, that’s why Hawkeye Pierce could go back to the operating table to save the life of a little girl after a careless word resulted in the death of a baby.

That’s a little magical, in this high-tech, no-time, hateful world we live in, the idea that doing not just what you have to do, but what you can do could be enough to be “heroic”.  What really is a hero?  There’s just no complete answer to that question, because what makes somebody or something a hero can’t be defined until the moment it happens.  The real question is what can we learn from the ones we have – be they real, the police and the firefighters and the service men and women out there fighting so we don’t have to, or imagined, the courageous knights in shining armor standing against the threatening dragon despite their fear.

Do what you can do.  Not just what you have to do.  It might not make you a hero… but it just might help get us a little farther along, and that is heroic.

Men beside me, brothers in arms and brothers in blood, allies all with only our ancestors to watch over us. Sisters too, sisters and mothers, sons and daughters, any that are not willing to admit our time may be at an end. All too aware we stand, aligned in the awareness that this forsaken morn might be our last. Anxious in the darkness, the agony of waiting sparks a flicker of anger…

Lights in the distance, the torches and the bonfires, the flames of those who come to take our lives. Flames and fires in our lines too, the fanned sparks of anger growing to become fury and outrage. Yet with the ferocity comes fear, and fright too, coiling through our souls, burrowing deep and festering, scrabbling at the hearts where courage fights to endure…

Steel against leather, blades scrape from their scabbards, shattering the silence as the drums of war strike against the stagnant night. Silver moonlight on silver swords, starlight striking notched arrows raised to the skies. Steady hands, and stubborn hearts, succumbing neither to fear nor fate. The attackers sound their horns, streaming across the field, the war has come…

Arrows loosed, catapults fly, men scream, men die… Raiders and warriors and brothers and sisters, their blood on the soil is shared among all. Blades bite, fires burn, fertile land is overturned. One by one, then one becomes all…

No more screams, no more anger. No more enemies, no more allies. No more courage, no more fear. No more darkness, only the sun…

Death has come.

I can remember being able to just sit down and write when I was younger. It was a release for me – a way to simply relax, and let the thoughts that had been shuttered up in my skull exit through my pen. What I got down wasn’t always great, or even very good, but it was coherent, and it was serviceable. I could let my imagination stretch itself out and just work, letting the paper catch the results. A blank page wasn’t a barrier, it was a window into what was going on in my head. The topic didn’t matter – I could write a report as easily as I could a short story, and neither took any real effort for me.

It was the same when I first started getting into programming, too. By then, I’d started having trouble sitting down and writing stories – though when I could write I was creating better material than I ever had before. But getting into computer code was something that came quickly, and naturally, without thought, just like writing had before. I enjoyed it, and it served as a way to relax. I could just sit and write code for hours, and never even notice the time slipping away.

Even that’s not as true, anymore. I find my mind wanders while I’m working, but never anywhere useful. When I was younger, my mind wandered into places fantastic and magical, or filled with starships and new worlds. I could use those wanderings, could craft them into prose, and most importantly, they didn’t distract me from what I was doing at the moment. Now, when my mind goes wandering, it tends to take the rest of me with it, in all my scatterbrained glory. It’s not the page in front of me that’s blank, it’s the gray one rattling around in my skull that’s completely empty.

It worries me. Like so much else in my life, it does worry me, but for a very particular reason in my case. Not so long ago, I watched my grandmother – a wonderful, outgoing, brilliant woman who’d lived a truly incredible life – as she descended into the grips of Alzheimer’s. I watched her slip away very quickly, and though I’m still too young – much too young, really – for it to be a real concern, I can’t help but wonder. I can’t help but wonder, at the strange loss of ability to sit down and let the words flow, at the way my thoughts seem to shatter at the lightest grasp for them.

When she was diagnosed, she was living in her own home. She had the occasional lapse of memory, the occasional burst of confusion, but who doesn’t? It didn’t seem too bad. A year later, her house had been sold, I’d bought her car, and she was bundled into a senior living apartment. A year after that… she was gone. Two years, after a lifetime, that’s all that it took. The incredible woman that was my grandmother faded, and then passed away. Two years.

Somewhere in the real world, I know the answer is something much simpler – I’m just not as young as I used to be. Everybody changes with age, and where I’ve lost some ability in one area, I’ve gained in others. I can’t just sit down and write anymore, no, but my writing has improved substantially in the intervening years. Writing computer code makes me stop and think now, but that’s because I’ve learned far more about it since my first fumbling attempts – learned better ways of planning that require thinking ahead, instead of just doing. All around, it’s an improvement, not a loss. A new maturity, long belated if my family is to be believed.

That little hesitation is always there, though. Seeing my grandmother like that, so far away even when she was right next to me, ensured that it always will be. It’s all part of the human experience, right? Fear of getting older and losing what little dignity we were parceled out to begin with. I think that’s probably what bothers me about what happened to her more than anything else. Not that it happened, or even how thoroughly it did away with her, but how fast.

Every year goes by faster and faster. Two years – that’s all that it took for her. Will I even notice when it finally does happen to me, as it likely will, eventually? I honestly dunno. All that I do know is that blank pages have been giving me troubles, lately… and that it’s time that stopped.