What's new

Role Models

Status
Not open for further replies.
Barry Bridges

Barry Bridges

First Team Regular
Messages
4,302
Reaction score
1,383
Well, weve been hearing so much of the word I figured perhaps it would be interesting to see who is role model materials to the people on this list!

For me

My dad....came from a ranch in Southern Alberta and self made himself into a Director of Finaince and Administration for some of the largest and most prestigous law firms in western Canada. Put himself through night school while working full time and rasing a family. On the way he had jobs such as police officer, labourer, and he even went up to the Artic to work on an ice breaker, as the money was badly needed and the pay was great, but you more than earned every penny. Does anyone know David Sazuki? One of the firms my dad used to work at had him as a client and in the middle of the meaning apparently David got up and pointed to my dad and sai "You sir, are a jewel in a city of turds". Hard man (most of my friends were terrified of him growing up) and uncompromising on his morals, but deep down a big softy and really I couldnt have ever asked for a better father. While most people go around saying "My parents let me down wah wah" or whatever, I always say "I hope I havent let my parents down" because they both have worked to the bone to provide every opportunity for me possible.

my unrelated role model would have to be Benjamin Franklin

He showed that no matter your origins, your future is 100% up to you. You might be born to a lower class family, but it doesnt mean you can go on to be an essential role in creating a nation! Inmy opinion, one of the greatest minds in history as a politician, philosopher, and inventor. He praised frugality and public service. Was the inventor of modern public libraries, modern postal service (over here anyways) fire brigades, lightning rods, the first to start researcher trade currents in the Atlantic just to scratch the surface. He also took a bunch of hot heated yanks who constantly quarreled and helped focus and consolidate them to the point where they were able to throw off the yoke of the mightiest empire in the world and was instrumental in revising the constitution so that all parties would sign on. He also has one of my fav qoutes

"Those who sacrifice essential liberty in order to gain temporary security, will desevre neither and lose both"

and was also quite the ladies man :D

imo, both picks are better than some lad who kicks a ball for a living. How about you guys?

 
Last edited by a moderator:
It's hard to pick out a role model for me (after reading your post Barry I think it might be your Dad ;) )

Seriously I think you grow up respecting some acts of some people and detesting some acts of some people, it can be real life or even Films/TV that has some influence on the way you think is best to behave, these as you carry on through life can become Morals you stick to without even remembering where they come from.

I can't think of many people that have had huge influences on me outside my family and close friends but I'm sure there are many but they probobly come to light in so many varying situations you would have no chance of knowing who's influence it was.

My Mum was a massive influence on me, she would help anyone and always give people more chances even when they abused her trust, she was the most caring person I have ever met to this day and I have come unstuck a few times for helping people a bit too much and giving people more chances than they deserve.

My Dad influenced me in the opposite way, I have rarely seen a more stingy bloke and he never cared about anyone but himself, he left when I was young but we met up years later and I lived with him for a while, he was the most selfish individual I can think of apart from maybe my half sister who although he wasn't her Dad he seemed to have a lot more feelings for..I'll leave that there.

My Brother was a big influence on me, he was a proper old School Villain and although he spent a lot of time in Prison, under his tough exterior he had a heart of gold, he would give anyone anything when he was doing well but he was a different animal when he was skint. He died young and I miss him every day.

all these people had influences on me and I try to keep an equilibrium between them making sure I never treat people the way my Dad did and guarding against doing too much for people like my mum did.

I got inflenced by footballers but this influence only came out with a ball at my feet, in the 70s I played in goal for a while cos of Bonetti and then I watched Charlie cooke closely until I could do the dragback where he would put his foot on the side of the ball and push through it, stop with his foot rolled on to the top pull it back and tap it through someones legs..

I got that to a T.

I remember when the Argies went to Tottenham in the eighties..I had to do the run on to the ball and kick it up backwards over your head thing..to be honest I had done that before thay arrived in the league but it got me practising it.

I Watched George best a lot as although he was a UTD player I thought he was great, never drunk as much as him and never pulled a miss world, watched Collymore later on but so far I've managed to walk through car parks late at night and still resist peeping through steamy windows.

I think you take what you will from other people and you only do what they do if you think its the right thing.

 
This is a very thought-provoking thread, which makes me realise that I don’t know when the expression “role-model†was invented. It certainly didn’t exist when I was a child. And a hero was someone who did something incredibly brave with no thought for himself or herself. Hence Douglas Bader (from the Second World War) or Edith Cavell (from the first) were seen as heroes. Rock Hudson and Doris Day were not.

Television HAD been invented when I was a child (before Mod claims otherwise) but my parents wouldn’t buy one on the grounds that it would distract me from my school work (probably true). So I had to go round to a friend’s house to watch the Six Five Special. (which sometimes had Geezer’s Dad on it!)

So who did I aspire to be like? In my pre-teens I longed to be like George the tom-boy from Enid Blyton’s Five. I wanted to be mistaken for a boy, wear shorts, climb trees, skim stones on the sea etc. I did climb trees, wearing dungarees, but was never mistaken for a boy. By the time I was eleven I had definite protuberances on my chest which ruled out any hope of ever being mistaken for a boy.

Anyway, by then I’d moved on from Enid Blyton. My sister and I went to the Saturday matinee every week, and there I fell in love with Davy Crockett (King of the Wild Frontier). So I got myself a knife and spent a long time whittling sticks. (but never killed me a bear.)

At seventeen I wanted to be like Joan Baez. Not being able to sing was a distinct disadvantage. I warbled “Farewell Angelina†out of tune and soon learned that for me singing was a solitary activity. (mind you warbling out of tune worked for Bob Dylan!)

I was lucky. Life was simple. There was no temptation. Newspapers had articles about the world situation, wars, politics, the weather, sport, but no salacious prying into famous people’s lives. (The word “celebrity†had not been invented). There was a magazine called “Titbits†which I saw on the shelves of paper shops but it never entered my home, and I don’t expect there was anything too naughty in it.

Nowadays the kids are bombarded from a very early age with temptations of all sorts. They learn very young that it’s important to be beautiful, that your class-mates will judge you on what make of trainers you wear, that people will ask you what sort of a car your parents have.

Only the kids themselves can choose their “role modelsâ€: their parents and teachers can’t foist role models on them against their will. And it would be pretty naïve to expect kids to choose a parent or a teacher when they see glamorous pop stars and footballers on their screens every day. A poll out today says that the majority of kids see Cheryl Cole as their favourite “ideal†teacher.

Many of these “celebrities†are just kids who happen to have ONE talent. But the impresarios who run TV shows and have £ signs before their eyes, are laughing all the way to the bank. And kids from a very early age are a target audience, with no resistance.

Unlike Barry Bridge, I didn’t see my parents as an influence, and was in fact determined to be as unlike my mother as I possibly could be. Imagine my chagrin now when my sons repeatedly tell me how like her I have become. I am considering cutting them out of my will.

I feel quite sorry for the kids of today, who in many ways have a much harder life than I had. However, when I look at youngsters like Ruh Buh Juh, Eggy, and PloKoon, I think maybe there is still hope for the planet!

 
I've never had anyone I've looked to as a role model or who I've aspired to be like. I grew up being known as "George Chisholm's son" and that rankled me big time. I wanted to be known for who I was not for who my father was. I think this, more than anything else stopped me from looking up to other people - respect them yes - but not as role models. Took me a long time to find the real me but I've been successful at what I do and at least I can say I've done it on my own merits as me and not as someone else's son. I'm proud of that.

So as you can probably guess, my answer to who I would view as a role model - no one.

 
Geezer, you're a genius! You've hit the nail on the head. The essence of a well-adjusted person is to be happy to be himself/herself.

Young people now are being actively encouraged NOT to be theirselves, but to waste their emotions and energies on striving to be third-rate copies of the people the media present as personalities to be admired.

 
moi said:
Geezer, you're a genius! You've hit the nail on the head. The essence of a well-adjusted person is to be happy to be himself/herself.Young people now are being actively encouraged NOT to be theirselves, but to waste their emotions and energies on striving to be third-rate copies of the people the media present as personalities to be admired.
Click to expand...
I agree with you so much moi. I would love it if people would actually be themselves instead of just copying others. Would be nice if people would be less influenced by the media.

 
moi said:
Geezer, you're a genius! You've hit the nail on the head. The essence of a well-adjusted person is to be happy to be himself/herself.Young people now are being actively encouraged NOT to be theirselves, but to waste their emotions and energies on striving to be third-rate copies of the people the media present as personalities to be admired.
Click to expand...
As the song goes "learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all".

 
geezer said:
As the song goes "learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all".
Click to expand...
and an excellent excuse for self-abuse! (sorry now I've lowered the tone)

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Like Geezer I don’t have anyone that I consider a role model, nor do I feel I ever have. That is not intended as a slur on my parents (which is what it may be perceived as because parents are traditionally seen as the primary provider of guidance) but rather as a recognition that my parents were as human as all of us and, as such, got a healthy amount of things right and a fair number of things wrong. I now find myself getting an entirely different amount of things wrong and right, and most probably making some of the same mistakes they made, almost as if I am in denial that it annoyed me first time round.

Aside from parents who else do you look to? Celebrities (be it music, film, sport etc), politicians (home and abroad), people in the local community who appear to give something that others aren’t prepared to…

Anyone of those categories, or many other categories, provide people that some consider as role models however they are all strangers to me. How can you consider someone to be a role model when all you know is there TV persona, or their manifesto or ability to do the Mark Walters shuffle. These people are icebergs to us, we see the 10% that is visible above the surface and are clueless about the 90% below the water line. Considering that as a role model is a little like thinking classic literature is the pinnacle of writing because you read Dickens then ignored the next 150 years of writing.

 
I don't have any role models either, but I'm rather proud of my maternal grandmother, Omie.

She came from a German family of 12 kids. One of her older brothers got completely mad while serving in a submarine in World War I. She married my grandfather, who was Dutch but had family in Germany. She moved to Holland during the Depression, got 3 kids and suffered a couple of miscarriages. Life was tough and they had move around for every new job my grandfather could get. Eventually he got a job for a trading company in the US and the family was supposed to join him when World War II broke out. So my Omie had to run the family in a war, when her male relatives had to serve in the German army. A very conflicting situation, although she loathed the Nazis (thank goodness).

Her favourite sister passed away, and she couldn't travel to the funeral. The Nazis confiscated all radios, so people couldn't listen to news broadcasts from England. The Nazis, who knew she was originally German, came to her door to offer that she could keep her radio IF she sent the children to the German school. She refused, saying she and her children were Dutch, what did a German school have to do with anything?

Then the winter of 44-45 came: notorious for food and fuel shortages. Many people starved to death, but with the help of my mother, the eldest, she scrounged enough food and fuel to make it. After Holland was liberated, some Allied soldiers came to arrest her. They did that to all Germans and collaborators. The soldiers were sent packing by the entire street! Then came the news that her beloved nephews were all missing in action in Russia, not hard to imagine what had happened to them. Their father, Omie's brother, stood for years at the local trainstation when a train from the East would come in with a plackard "Do you know what happened to my sons?" He never got his answer and it destroyed him. Most of the other relatives were bombed out of their homes. One of her brothers-in-law was a Soviet POW, he came back after 10 years a broken man.

My grandfather came home, and they were practically estranged after all that time apart. They stayed together, divorce was out of the question in that time, and still she was the one to keep things running, as my grandfather was completely useless as a parent (although he turned out to be a great "opa" to his grandchildren).

In the face of all adversity and grief, worries about her children, husband and family in Germany, she stood tall. Yet she wasn't a hard or bitter woman, she was the sweetest grandmother anyone could have. And she loved her whiskey once she was able to afford it! If I have an ounce of her strength, I'll be happy.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
What a wonderful story! Your Omie is a worthy role model!

 
David Suzuki..what Canadian hasn't heard of him...mind you I think he has gone way over the edge with his views and brow beating of politicians...why are they so scared of him? Sounds like your dad was a great role model and a great Canadian!

 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top