[作文] issue 122，变态写作指导，望拍

Many parents tend to tell stories of heroes at night to the children, passing the idea of heroes from generation to generation, which to some extent demonstrates a time, an ideal, even the character of a society. Probably from this point, the author contends unequivocally that the best to apprehend the character of a society is to observe the character of the heroes. But there exist several flaws in this issue, making it partial after a close scrutiny.

As is universally known, heroes are more like symbols representing people’s ideals than real ones. For example, Joan of Arc could be venerated by a variety of people belonging to different classes. However, not everyone is likely to become her, due to different situations today from the fourteenth century. Thus in analogy, the society might avoid forming the same character of her, since it may be well be understood that the character would be unsuitable to the present conditions, were it put into use without consideration. Joan of Arc may be valiant, but that is according to the demanding of the times she lived, which has changed with the vicissitude of times-- contemporary needs require more intelligence than gut to be satiated. On the contrary, an idealistic person could sometimes provide characters of the society, when taking Hitler into account. He built up Nazi, announcing to sweep the whole world, which could represent the special need for Germany to enlarge its frontier at that time. Nevertheless, that should also be counted as a ephemeral requirement generating in the darkest duration, disappearing over time. Thereby it’s fallacious to equal different times of characters.

Besides, there’s no denying that the characters of heroes could be exaggerated by wicked persons for some evil plans. Heroes are also ordinary people, making it necessary for people to learn from their merits as well as circumvent their weaknesses, notwithstanding there are existence of god-like heroes to regulate people’s faith in government. Admittedly, Chairman Mao creates a legend that almost holds the fate of China in a long period. But it’s still acknowledged to be not enough to offset the mistakes he made reversing the development of China for a decade. Only by locating the weaknesses of heroes can societies head forward continuously, though some conspirators are always masking them by design. Had we researched only the decade of recession of China—which was true—we would have never realized how fast China has been developing these years. In this case, it’s easy to differentiate the character decades ago from that nowadays.

Although the foregoing reasons are tenable, we should also consider the opposite position: could the characters of heroes be turning out to represent the characters of societies on some occasions? No doubt this is often the case given that people like Gandhi, who leads India to freedom, could symbolize a pursuit of this society. As long as his contributions are worth being memorized annually, his mistakes made during his life could be certainly ignored. Thus heroes’ contributions would be everlasting, so would be his character—especially ones representing the character of the relevant society.

On the whole, the characters of heroes are not representative of the characters of societies more often than not, though on certain occasions it’s possible that we can comprehend the character of the society by examining the character of its heroes. As a matter of fact, what counts for this paradox lies not in the key of determining the contemporary situations and needs, compared with those in the past, which should be taken into consideration before deciding to observe the characters of heroes in depth.