Throughout history we’ve had our share of heroes whose actions have been minor, but with consequences that were major. From a woman simply refusing to give up her seat on a bus, or some men ditching tea on a bay, or a man with shopping bags standing in front of a tank, to a man simply refusing to hate his enemy, we have seen how some acts of defiance have shaped our world.
If we consider that heroes to some are often people who break the law or tradition of others, you have to wonder how the shoe-throwing reporter in Baghdad will be remembered by his own people, for after all, disdained by the enemy is in itself, already a badge of honor.
I don’t think it’s too farfetched to believe that his countrymen will remember him, to paraphrase an American hero, as a man who "only regrets that he has but two shoes to give up for his country."
His actions make sense to me as seen through the eyes of the movie Forrest Gump. There’s a scene where Jenny returns to where she was raised, and Forrest finds her throwing rocks at the shack where she was abused as a child. Forrest holds her and simply says: "Sometimes, I guess there’s just not enough rocks."
When I consider the atrocities and destruction George Bush brought to Iraq, I have to say to the Iraqi people: sometimes there just aren’t enough shoes.
I have no idea what benefit will come to anyone by having one man throw a pair of shoes at another. But to ignore, and even dismiss, the rage that can cause such an act, in the aftermath of destroying the shoeless man's country and killing hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, while indiscriminately arresting and torturing thousands more, denotes the lack of sensibility that encouraged and supported the carnage and atrocities in the first place.
Barack Obama has bigger shoes to fill than he ever expected in trying to restore sanity to our political discourse because the proverbial fat, ignorant -- and we can now add, sadistic -- American has grown to epidemic proportions.