Courage

Courage often lies with daring the impossible. The word originated from Medieval French meaning "heart and spirit," because courage requires a brave heart and a courageous spirit. True courage means facing down an impossible situation. It means defying conventional wisdom, the voices of authority, social pressures and sometimes even common sense to do what is right.

The media today excels at telling us what to think and what to believe. What good 'normal' ideas we should hold, as opposed to the evil 'extremist' ones. What attitudes are acceptable and what attitudes are unacceptable. For many the media has become the voice of conscience suppressing the human conscience within. It has usurped the role of G-d, the role of our parents and our teachers. It takes courage to defy these things.

For those who have adopted the normative positions of the media as truth defiance is extremism and the defier an extremist. To step outside their box, to hold to actual values and beliefs is to be such terrible terms as a fundamentalist, an extremist, an evil person.

To defy the authorities who forget that they are the servants of the people and not its masters takes a particular form of courage. The men who overthrew imperial tyranny and set up a great nation on the American continent had that courage. So did those who set up Israel once. Today that courage lies not in the timorous President who defends Islam and spends hundreds of millions of dollars to appease terrorists or with the corrupt Olmert regime which sends out thugs in black to beat up children. It is with those like the Minutemen or the settlers who still are ready and willing to defend their nations, even at the cost of defying the mass will of the media, politicians and intellectual elites; that courage still lies.