Of Heroes and Myths: Why the stories we tell ourselves are breaking us—and how they might still save us

We’ve all seen the videos by now. On Saturday, January 25th, a mild-mannered ICU nurse from the local VA hospital witnessed a squad of federal agents push an unknown woman down on a cold Minneapolis street, and reached down to help her. He put his body between them and her as she struggled on the ground. For that act of kindness, he was knocked down himself, pepper-sprayed in the face, beaten and ultimately shot - even though the only thing he had in his hand was his phone - even though he never touched the gun he had a permit to carry - even though they had already disarmed him -even though 6 of them were holding him down. His last recorded words, spoken to the woman he tried to protect: “Are you alright? Are you alright?” After shooting him 5-10 times, the agent involved left the scene, and the Federal Government is refusing to reveal his identity. He slunk off and hid like a true coward.

Alex J. Pretti died a hero. Unfairly. Tragically. He died because he did what a hero does, put his life at risk to help another human being. And that just guts me, as it did most of Minnesota, and much of our country.

If life worked liked fairy tales, romance novels, or action movies, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would have saved the damsel in distress. He would have defeated the thugs attacking her and won the keys to the kingdom, and her love and devotion as well. That’s how fiction and fairy tales work. Good triumphs. Evil is vanquished.

But here is the thing about fairy tales, romance novels, and action movies, they work as myths in our society. And what the people who study myths tell us is that myths function to resolve contradictions in a culture, contradictions that would otherwise threaten the culture’s existence. They contain a twisted logic that transforms something that is unacceptable into something acceptable.

In America, we want to believe our myths: good guys win; bad guys lose; honesty and character pay off; anyone can succeed if they just work hard enough; people fail because of character flaws like laziness or dishonesty. And because we want to believe, we devour the romance and action dramas like candy, or cocaine, until we are so buzzed with it that we can’t think straight.

Now here’s the twist: Once a culture has bought into the myth, it applies the logic of the myth to make something unbearable in real life, bearable.

Americans want to believe that good guys win, and are rewarded with wealth, love, fame, power, all the good stuff. And so we twist the logic and assume that anyone who has those things is, by default, a hero. Anyone who doesn’t is a villain. That logic is so deeply ingrained in western culture that the the word “villain” itself originally just meant poor person or serf.

Deep down, many of us know that myth is untrue. Many people at the highest pinnacles of power were either just born to wealth, or were willing to be ruthless to acquire it. Or both. You only need to look at our current administration to see the truth. And you only need to look at friends, relatives, and neighbors to know that many people will be honest, hard working, and kind, while living their entire lives only one lost paycheck away from homelessness.

Yet it is unbearable for us to live with the idea that Cinderella could never be good enough, pretty, enough, hard working enough, to win a prince and escape the ashes. That the bravest of knights could be vanquished by the evil ogre. That a man brave enough to put his body between a woman and a gang of men attacking her could be gunned down like a dog in the street.

Do you want an explanation for why we can have such a divided country? How we can have two such divergent views of reality in America? We are currently a country of two narratives: One spun by the people who cannot let go of the myth no matter what they see; one by the people who cannot let go of what they have seen in order to continue believing the myth.

I am in the second camp. I know that good guys don’t always win. Alex J. Pretti was proof of that. Renee Nicole Good was also proof. They both died for being heroes.

So where do I fit in as an author in this picture? What is my job and my role? As an author, I don’t just tell stories — I reckon with the tension between how the world is and how it could be. I don’t aim to erase hard truths, but to reframe them so that our most cherished ideals don’t become traps that blind us to reality.

Here is the new myth I want to create in honor of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the new tale I want to tell:

Good does not always triumph at first; but it triumphs in the end.

Let’s make that happen. For Alex and Renee.