Elie Wiesel's Heroism

Gerard Way once said, "Heroes are ordinary people who make themselves extraordinary." In other words, one has to make themselves a hero. No one needs to be born with magnificent strength or the audacity to stand up to any bully that might come their way. Heroism is self built. To be heroic is to be passionate, to believe in the greater good, and to live without hate. Heroism is being passionate. Whether that passion be for a person, for art, equality, etc, it is what drives someone to be extraordinary. It makes them fight, it makes them stand up, it ignites the fire in a hero's heart. For instance, Sylvia Rivera, while making a speech for the Stonewall movement, said, "I'll be the first one to step on any organization, and politician's
A quote that exemplifies this is by Elie Wiesel, who once said, "When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude." Elie Wiesel is a writer, who was put through Auschwitz as a Jew during the Holocaust. He has been given many reasons to give up on humanity, but he chooses not to. Though Wiesel has seen unspeakable things, he still has love to give. A second example of this is human rights activist Malala Yousafzai. She fights for education for all, specifically girls in third world countries. While speaking on anti-discrimination, she said, "There should be no discrimination against languages people speak, skin color, or religion." In today's world, though we like to pretend otherwise, there is a lot of hate centered around those things. People see someone different and instantly separate themselves from that person. They become ignorantly hateful. Malala speaks against that hatefulness, and rejects the idea that people should be treated differently based on those things. A final example is Mattie stepanek, a poet and a peace advocate. He was diagnosed with a rare muscular dystrophy, and only lived to fourteen. A quote of his, speaking about peace, is, "If we simply, but profoundly, choose to make peace an attitude and a habit and a reality, peace is possible." Stepanek is saying that if one acted peacefully, and then others did the same, the world would be filled with peace. Just like Wiesel, Mattie's life had not been kind to him. He had valid reasons to be angry, but through it all he smiled, and imagined a world where everyone could do the