Trolley man not perfect, but heroic
HE was the homeless man who made national headlines after his courageous actions in the Bourke St terror attack last week.
Now police are saying they want to talk to Michael Rogers in relation to a number of alleged burglaries.
This has led some pundits to try to take “trolley man” down a peg or two — saying he was always too good to be true and we should not have believed he was a hero.
But it is more complicated than that, and those who thought he was a hero were not wrong.
Is he a man with issues, no real fixed address, a person who takes illegal drugs and has several criminal allegations against his name — including burglary? Yes he is. He volunteered much of this information himself in the aftermath of the attack, including the fact he had battled drug addiction and been in jail.
Does any of this disqualify his actions from being heroic? Absolutely not.
You only have to watch the footage to see that his interventions with the trolley against the knifewielding terrorist may have prevented the death and injury toll of that day being higher.
Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. When the chips are down the people who come to your aid might surprise you — and the people who society holds up as virtuous and perfect may be found missing in action.
Just because someone makes mistakes it does not mean they cannot go on to do extraordinary good in the world. There can be second acts in Australian lives. And we should believe in redemption or at least complexity.
We should abandon the foolish notion that there is no bad in people we consider virtuous and no good in those we consider villains. Human history says otherwise.
Trolley man may be a druggie, a jailbird and a criminal.
But in a few minutes on Bourke St he displayed more courage and selflessness than many of us do in entire lifetimes.