Who are the heroes of our time? Who is driving us to a better future? And who is inspiring and guiding us?

Anything goes: famous people, people in your own life, fictional people who represent something to your culture, groups of people working behind the scenes etc.

The only rule is they must be current.

  • traches@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Open source software maintainers, thanklessly (and often without pay) maintaining infrastructure without which the global economy would collapse immediately

  • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    EMS ; chronically underpaid and overstressed.

    When a cop complains about the terrible things they see on their job, they are talking about the stuff the saw watching EMS work.

    • Zonetrooper@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This. “Overstressed” doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s an unimaginably stressful job even when things are going right.

      • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Under appreciated movie from the 1980s, “Repo Man.”

        Harry Dean Stanton tells Emilio Estevez “I hate normal people. Normal people spend their whole damn lives trying to avoid tense situations. Repo man spends his whole life putting himself into tense situations.”

  • leaky_shower_thought@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    not in any specific order:

    SPI, the foundation supporting debian and arch projects.

    boeing whistleblowers, and anybody willing to step up against these kinds of corpo shenanigans.

    people who wear masks.

    stephen colbert, john oliver and their news team

    lemmy posters

  • red_rising@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The transgender population, especially transgender youth. If one group’s rights can be stripped away, then any group’s can. They are the front line soldiers against the spread of fascism.

  • cosmic_cowboy@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    Teachers. It is such a widely known trope that teachers are overworked and underpaid. So many that want to pursue teaching now enter the market, understanding that they will likely need a second job at some point. Although internet kudos do little to actually address the problem, my respect goes to the teachers.

  • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Stephen Hawking.

    He has influenced how physicists look at the world, and they in turn have taught us how to see the world, and nearly everybody believes what he has told (even though some of the topics do not fit with newer observations anymore, but still nobody has come up with really better explanations).

  • LesserAbe@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Kind of on the tail end of their careers, but Senator Ron Wyden on privacy/surveillance, and Bernie Sanders on most stuff. Good question for a thread.

  • Elaine Cortez@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    EMS, the scientists who made the vaccines which have prevented millions of deaths from COVID, and the mothers who are making the effort to raise up their kids to be the best people they can be.

  • theluddite@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Alexandra Elbakyan (Scihub) has probably done more for scientific progress than anyone alive.

  • amio@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Scientists and other rationalists. If you wanted to be dramatic, their fight to save ourselves and the planet would be against the inertia of “common wisdom”, known bugs in human psychology, the resistance of wanting to disregard the unknown or unpleasant, everyone for whom the truth (to the best of our knowledge) is economically inconvenient with the considerable economic and societal power they wield.

    They are not good odds, but it is correct against incorrect and often against malignantly incorrect, and they are all extremely formidable villains.