Heroes and Villians.

The world needs more heroes. Sure Batman, Spiderman and Ironman are doing their thing in the movies but is Ironman going to get you through your week, including important meetings with the boss, that gym session you've been dreading, the senior management presentation or the family dinner with Uncle Joe that always ends in tears? We are constantly looking for role models, mentors and people to admire, making our sometimes humdrum dailies bearable and giving us the power to carry on through periods of stress and anxiety. More often than not, when it comes to our heroes, we look in the wrong places and more often than not, we are be disappointed.

So it came as a shock to read that Tom Hanks had been arrested for strangling and murdering five people in a drunken rampage, on his way to escaping into the Hollywood hills in a stolen Mercedes. A stolen Mercedes that had already been involved in a school crossing homicide, where Hanks ran down three children and a crossing guard. Who is left to admire if Tom Hanks has sunk so low, who is left to look up to if Tom Hanks is capable of such atrocity and how do we find another Tom to admire? People in Hollywood and as far afield as San Diego were aghast, commenting they had no one left to admire and respect, now that Tom had fallen from grace. For many, Tom was their last hope for a role model for their children, their relationships and their daily interactions at work.

Lance, Oscar, Lindsay, Tiger, Charlie, OJ, those guys from Enron and Opes Prime, not to mention Bernie Madoff, Martha Stewart, local boys like Alan Bond and Craig Thomson and a host of others, who have risen to power and money on the back of our trust and belief, are either facing charges, in jail or trying to live through the disgraced state of their past indiscretions. So who's left, who do we look to, who we admire, who do we approve of when it comes to bench marking attitudes, behaviour and social commentary. Now the last Hollywood hero has been debunked and we are left in limbo, in a vacuum when it comes to the archetypal example for our kids to admire, for us to deify as upstanding and courageous in the face of daily challenges.

Before Hollywood, before the Kardashians and before mass media became the beacon of societal mores, we had role models closer to home. We had role models in parents, work colleagues and high achieving friends. The problem arose when Mum and Dad became less exciting than the current high scorer in your favourite sport, or your work colleague just wasn't doing it for you like Lady Gaga was doing it for you. Sure the local models may not have been as shiny, as popular or or even as gifted when it came to texting inane messages to fill the tweetosphere but they had one important advantage over Lance and the rest of the fallen.

They were here, they were real and they cared about you. Time to flick the Who magazine and have a chat with your Dad, talk with the people at work who are making a difference to others and look closer at your inner circle. You'll be surprised who you can look up to.

PS. For the trusting, Tom didn't do all the bad things mentioned, although his next movie Cloud Atlas doesn't make up for all the previous good work.