My Heroes... Vernon, New Jersey

Yes, I've chosen a city this week. It was a city crippled by corruption within the city's government. They decided to go back to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Is it perfect? No. But it's better, and they've rediscovered hope.

I look at what they've done and look at myself and what I've been trying to do. I recognized that what I'd embraced in my past was corrupt, and I needed to change. So, scrapped the old stuff, and started over, stripping down to the foundation, and re-examining everything that to be added to that foundation before going ahead with it.

No, I don't expect everyone to be inspired by Vernon. In fact, I suspect most people will not be, but that isn't the post of My Heroes. My heroes are the one's who inspire Me. I hope others will find their own heroes. You see, I spent most of my life without any heroes. There were people I admired, and people I wanted to be like, or thought I wanted to be like, and yet it didn't feel quite right. I hadn't realized the problem was that my life was based on lies, a lot of them. When I started the truth campaign I realized that a lot of those people I admired no longer fit the me I was trying to create, and never really had. I had to start over, make new definitions, and allow for flaws.

Some heroes are more heroic than others. Trying to find a hero every week has given me the opportunity to explore my definition of hero. Some of my heroes are bigger than life as I see it. I could never hope to be anything like them but a pale shadow. And there are those who inspire me not in their extraordinariness but in their everyday enduring.

So if you wonder at some of my choices, from week to week, here is my criteria: Each week I try to choose someone who inspired me that week, and I don't repeat myself, because there isn't time or space. There are so many amazing people in the world. I also haven't featured any of my friends, not because I don't admire them and hold them as lamps in my life, but because I don't want to invade privacy or inadvertently hurt any feelings. I try to let them know, in private, how much they mean to me.

I prefer a life with heroes.