When I was 22 years old, I moved to New York. I wanted to be a writer, and after earning a degree in journalism, I did what I thought most big-time writers did: I lived in the Big Apple and struggled to survive on hardly any income. I spent my entire first year there riding to work back and forth on the subway and consuming nearly everything Jack Kerouac wrote thanks to the Brooklyn Public Library.
Now, I don’t think anyone would consider boozing, drug-using Kerouac to be a role model necessarily, but I really admired his free-spirit, his ideas about writing and how he bucked the trend of following the rules to instead follow his muse and ‘the road.’
A few years later, I read in a biography of what a lousy father he was. He refused to acknowledge that his only child, Jan, was even his until a paternity test years later proved it. Even afterward, while he paid a minimal sum for child support, it is reported that he only met with Jan on a handful of occasions. Unfortunately, she followed his self-destructive fate and died at the young age of forty-four, presumably of her indulgence in drugs.
I looked at Kerouac differently after that. He was no longer my hero, neither as a person or a writer. While I still respect what he tried to do as an artist, I really dislike the choice he made with his daughter. I haven’t read much of his work since.
But should that even matter? With all of the news currently surrounding Tiger Woods’ tarnished image, the talk of role models and what they mean to us is prominent. First of all, I realize that Jack Kerouac and Tiger Woods are on completely different spectrums. Kerouac did not appeal to young kids, he wasn’t really the stuff of role models, whereas Tiger Woods has (or had) a large following amongst children and—at least publicly—was the poster boy for being a successful, generous athlete. While he won’t win a prize for husband of the year anytime soon, he may still be the greatest golfer who ever lived, and for that matter, a good father.
There’s a web site created specifically for debate who is and who isn’t a role model. RoleModel.net recently announced that Tiger Woods is no longer on their list of role models. So who is a role model these days? If we can’t look to athletes, politicians, movie stars — who then?
If you want your children to have someone to look up to, we parents have to admit that it must start with us. We need to be the role models for our kids to strive to emulate, not Miley Cyrus. And beyond parents, perhaps other relatives, grandparents, teachers, or other adults in our communities who do what they can to do something good for someone else. Besides, no where in the definition of role model does it say that one needs to be famous.
But maybe that’s part of the problem. Perhaps we need to modify our definition of what a role model is. Nobody’s perfect, so does a role model need to be? On today, the holiday that honors the great achievements and inspirations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., what better role model can we think of than him? Intelligent, brave, sacrificing his life so that others can have better ones. However, over the years, there have been allegations that Dr. King was not faithful to his wife. I’m not here to argue the validity of those claims, but say they were in fact true. Does that knowledge in any way diminish who he was or the work he did? I don’t think so. Isn’t he still considered a great man and by that same measure, a great role model? Yes, of course, he his. What he did continues to inspire and will do so for generations to come.
Even being role models ourselves, we parents will make mistakes. I think that it’s important to show our kids that we’re not perfect. But it’s also important to show them that when we do make mistakes, we admit them and do our best to correct them. Maybe that should be the new definition of a role model: someone who strives to do good, and if they fall short, strive to take corrective actions and to do better next time.
Or maybe we should teach our kids that it’s possible to still admire the art, while overlooking the flaws of the artist. Besides, while I can judge Kerouac’s writing, only Jan can be the real judge of what kind of father he really was.
