On bravery

Maybe it's just me, but I tend to not trust people who have had no struggle in life.

We can see what such a charmed life can lead to in our former president. Being born at home plate and thinking you've hit a homerun. I don't have hard statistical data, but anecdotally such people are more likely to have less empathy. They are more likely to subscribe to the myth that they owe all their success to their own efforts, and only their own efforts; get off your lazy tuchus and do the "work" they did. I do think of the likes of Trump, as well as Arabian princes, and aristocrats from across history. People who have never had to earn their bread, but have had gorgeous feasts laid out for them from infancy by people whom they don't acknowledge.

This is not to say that suffering stiffens the character. Again, anecdotally, you can have struggled your entire life and have been warped by that struggle, thinking that if you had no help, or perceive that you've had no help, no one else deserves help. We see this in how some have responded to President Joe Biden's plan to lessen the burden on student loan borrowers, with Republicans attempting to frame this as "hard working 'Muricans" vs. people who majored in Lesbian Dance Theory. Suffering can warp you just as much as indolence.

But those are the extremes.

Struggle and pain are the lot of human beings. The struggle can be minor, or it can be earth-shattering. It can be not getting into the school you wanted, or it can be a diagnosis of cancer. It can be temporary business setback, or it can be confronting a loved one's mortality. Bur for those living through that moment, all is subjective. All the pain one feels is existential, even if to an outsider the source of that pain seems to be minor. Demons are demons because they grip you, regardless of any objective calculus. And when that demon has you, all else slips away, and he is all you can envision.

I, like most of you, have fought demons my entire life. I've been blessed with an amazing support system from friends and family. I have not been alone in my struggles. But that doesn't make those struggles any less real. And that doesn't make the need for bravery any less.

We are in a point of history where everything hinges on a fulcrum. Swing this way: disaster. Swing that way: well, not paradise, but a much better fate for humanity. How we meet this historical hinge requires that elusive quality of bravery.

Bravery isn't the absence of fear. No. Bravery presupposes that fear is present. It assumes that fear is gnawing at you, eating away at your resolve. You don't need to be brave if you have no fear. But you face down your fear. You confront it. You don't allow it to rule you. That's what bravery is.

I was a long-time viewer of the series M*A*S*H. Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce had this wonderful definition of heroism, which has stuck with me all these years:

Frank, do you know what a hero is? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he's somebody who's tired enough and cold enough and hungry enough not to give a damn. I don't give a damn.

Bravery and heroism are when your current circumstances preclude you from leading a human life, and you have to roll the dice and bet all. It's when living with your demons is no longer tenable, and you have to move heaven and earth to defeat those demons, or they will defeat you. We're not super beings. But pain and suffering have made us not want to continue down that path in life, and we can achieve superhuman feats to alleviate that pain. Bravery is saying "enough, no more", and working to change one's condition. In my own small way I've been through that several times. I'm sure we all have. And now we're going through that as a culture, as a species. 

Bravery is fighting demons every day. You may not win every day. But you don't give up. You keep going until you win, or you pass from this world. Fighting the demons which haunt you is how you know you're still alive. Once you give that up, then you're just waiting for death.

Be bold and be brave. That's the only way you will ever achieve what you want, both for yourself and for the world. It's all that really matters.