Opinion | Don't fall for hero worship, be it the Olympics or the Diaoyus

Hero, hero, hero - I've cringed each time that word has been abused over the past month. Officials and the media in Hong Kong and on the mainland have turned to it again and again when referring to Olympic medal-winning athletes, the astronauts who went to the experimental space station and activists who landed on the disputed Diaoyu Islands. These are accomplishments, achievements, moments of personal pride and glory, but not acts of heroism. To refer to them as otherwise is to further denigrate a term that has been so misused that it has almost lost its significance.

Politics, commercial pressure and ignorance are at play. For officials, jumping on the hero bandwagon allows them to push the nationalism barrow while scoring popularity points. The media, working in a competitive environment in which public demands for news are insatiable, veers towards dramatic presentation to snare interest. Like the word "legend", hero does that nicely.

But hero is not a word to be used flippantly. It is about facing danger or risks, perhaps even sacrificing one's life, for the sake of others or for the greater good. Those who come through such an ordeal will have gained wisdom, strength and a better understanding of humanity. They will be people to learn from, look up to and to celebrate.

The greatest athletes may be all that and more to some people, but they are only doing what they are trained for. Astronauts are aware of the risks of space travel and have a mission to accomplish. The Diaoyu activists, pushing Beijing to be more assertive against Japanese territorial claims, understood Japan's navy would try to block their ship and that they faced arrest. Heroism involves risk and personal sacrifice; it is more than setting sights on a goal and attaining it.

Those are high ideals, but Hong Kong is not short of heroes. The gold medal of bravery, awarded most years by the government, celebrates some of those that have come to public attention. Among them have been Joanna Tse Yuen-man, the first public hospital doctor to die from Sars, firefighters Siu Wing-fong and Chan Siu-lung, killed by a blaze in Mong Kok in 2008 while rescuing trapped people, and volunteer orphanage worker Wong Fuk-wing, who gave his life saving children and teachers during earthquake aftershocks in Qinghai province in 2010. But being a hero does not have to be only about life and death; selfless and tireless campaigners for a better society also earn the accolade.

The line between what is admirable and heroic is easily blurred. At high school, I thought of ex-Beatle John Lennon as a hero, but I feel now that the writer of All You Need Is Love was more a role model. Better fitting the mould for me now is Nobel Peace Prize winner and physicist Joseph Rotblat, who turned his back on the US nuclear bomb programme in 1944 to campaign against such weapons, knowing it would affect his career and that he would be labelled a spy.