Heroes and otherwise.

When I was a kid, I had so many heroes.  Musicians, explorers, generals and soldiers, great aviators and car makers.
The Fogertys and Dylans and Zappas and Coopers and Lennons and McCartneys, the Alexanders and Boyingtons and Richtofens and Bradleys and Rommels and Slims and Auchinlecks, the Northrops and Vogts and Miles and De Havillands and Kartvelis, the Bugattis and Buccialis and Saoutchiks.
Then from my late teens on, the hero worship started to fall away.
I'm not sure what filled that particular vacuum. Possibly life itself.
The paying of bills.  The decisions I've made - wrong or right.
But yeah, life just sort of gets in the way.
And now as I look at my autumn years approaching, I think I'm going back to a state of hero worship.
This time, though, it's visionaries and people who genuinely try to make the world better - whatever that might mean.
Anthropologists, zoologists, psychologists and psychiatric and social philosophers, Utopian economists, philanthropists, scientists, the humanists of every persuasion.
I look around and think, "Am I too late? After all, as many as half of my childhood heroes contributed to the decimation of this world, if only in the smallest and seemingly most innocent of ways.
Are we all simply too late?"
Is this how it plays out epoch to epoch, zenith to zenith and finally nadir to nadir?
How strange life is.

Heathen.