Where were the zoo heroes?
In light of the child falling into the gorilla cage, I have a question to ask far more important than the quality of the barrier or holding his mother responsible: Where are our heroes?
Forget the mother for a second. A young child falls into a cage and not a single man was willing to risk his own well-being to jump in and try to save him? I am 100 percent certain that the men of my grandfather’s generation (the ones who weathered the Depression and defeated the Nazis) would have been in that moat in a heartbeat.
Most men in my father’s generation would have as well. And perhaps today, many of our best soldiers would have been down in that moat.
But what about the rest of us? More than a half-century ago, C.S. Lewis warned us about “men without chests.” Are we so self-centered, so unwilling to help the most vulnerable among us that we would not step up to help a child in danger? This reality tells us far more about our culture than who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Doug Griffin, Fresno
This story was originally published June 7, 2016 at 1:02 PM with the headline "Where were the zoo heroes?."