Waiting for Courage
Winston Churchill once said, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
But he was talking about his time in a brutal colonial war. Not a trip to the local shopping mall.
With mass shootings coming to our movie theaters and our church basements and now even the office Christmas lunch for God’s sake, it’s understandable that people are frightened. We have a goddamn lot to be afraid of.
In times past that might have brought out the best in the American people. Instead, we have Donald Trump standing at the podium calling on us to become a nation of cowards.
Cowardice is an apt description for Trump’s proposal following the jihadist-inspired massacre of 14 people in a San Bernardino office building. “A complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Listen to Trump explain his ideas and you can feel America’s greatness shrink like a private part dipped in a bucket of ice water. Never mind the slogan on his baseball cap.
The political establishment is disheartened because one crazy statement after another fails to sink Trump in the polls. Yet they’re the ones that end up sounding clueless when they try to respond. It’s unworkable! It’s un-American! It’s unconstitutional! It would violate international treaties! These are small, rational arguments. They play straight into Trump’s bombast, which has nothing to do with logic. He’s going straight for the emotions.
I’ve seen emotion overpower logic time and again in the big national brand campaigns I do for my clients. An emotional appeal works because it strikes something deep and real. No matter how you feel about Donald Trump, you have to admit he’s on to something that needs addressing. Fear is our deepest, darkest emotion and Trump is a master at using it to throw fuel on his fire. A response needs to strike the same sort of deep emotional chord.
The only answer to fear is courage.
That’s what needs to be said. Trump is shouting for everybody to run whimpering to the panic room, to sit huddled and hope the whole thing will somehow blow over. In response, we need Churchill. Someone to call that out as the act of a coward. To inspire the rest of us to stand bravely in the face of an unseen enemy.
The problem, of course, is that Churchill was an outlier. A politician who understood courage. One might hope the crowded field of presidential candidates would produce such a leader, if only based on numerical probabilities. I’m not holding my breath.
Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination roar in outrage. But their policies are basically the same nonsense hiding under a nicer haircut. Ditto the 31 governors who want to shut the doors of their states to refugees fleeing the violence we claim to be at war with. The Republican Party can’t stand up to the gun lobby or the Koch brothers. One wonders where they’ll find the backbone to stand against the global Caliphate.
The Democrats have done little more to step into the breach. There was hope President Obama would rise to the occasion when he delivered his Sunday evening address following the San Bernardino shootings. This was the opportune moment. The nation was waiting for something akin to the “A date which will live in infamy” language Roosevelt used after Pearl Harbor. Instead we got a rather bloodless discussion of strategic options. Most of us shut down the TV set feeling more deflated than ever.
Yet there is reason to hope. Outside of the political class examples of individual heroism abound.
Last summer three unarmed Americans on vacation tackled a Kalashnikov-wielding gunman aboard a high-speed train in Belgium. Count it as a Bunker Hill moment in the fight against Islamic terrorism.
Then there is the example of police officer Garrett Swasey. He sacrificed his life by running straight toward the gunfire in the Planned Parenthood shooting last month in Colorado Springs (a terrorist incident, by the way, that had nothing to do with Islam — maybe Mr. Trump needs to include right wing fanatics on the list of people he seeks to banish from the nation’s shores).
There is heroism in each of us. This is where it needs to begin. Then our leaders need to do something hard. Inspire the courage of the many.
We need to hear that we are in a fight that has nothing to do with religion, or nationality, or ethnicity. And everything to do with fear. We need to be told that a people is more easily defeated by fear than by force of arms. That we need to make courage the organizing principle that guides every move we make in this fight that has come to us.
More than anything, we need to be told that in this fight we will not retreat. Not from our enemies. Not from our ideals. Not from the words written in our Constitution. Or on our Statue of Liberty. That’s what our leaders need to be brave enough to tell us.
Of course it is possible that I’m wrong and Trump is right. That the nation’s courage was spent generations ago, the whole place is going down the toilet, and the only thing remaining to us is to shutter our borders and institute an asshole regime like Vladimir Putin’s Russia that seeks only to intimidate the world into leaving it alone. I sure as hell hope not.
