Courage

Dying children needs your courage right now. Will you help them? It is not that difficult, but it takes a great deal of courage. Do you dare to challenge the richest persons in the world, people who’s money can save millions of starving children, or will you just watch while the silent holocaust in the third world continues?

It is strange that people with courage usually don’t get involved in rescuing the world’s starving children. They join the police or military instead, or go skydiving just for the kick of it. But persons who actually care about the poor usually don’t have the guts to do anything but arrange demonstrations or attend meetings on poverty. Relatively speaking, caring for the weak seldom combines with courage, except for rescue workers and people like Gandhi and Francis of Assisi of course.

Courage should not be glorified out of proportion. But who will deny that the courage of fire fighters or ambulance personnel is admirable? It must also be admitted that many of the U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq have courage that deserves respect. And don’t forget that our freedom today in Europe is the direct consequence of the courage shown by soldiers on the beaches of Normandy. We would have been slaves without their sacrifice. In many cases, one might not agree with the reasons for going to war, but the courage of the individual warrior should not be doubted. Hopefully, some day that courage will be used to save innocent men, women, and children who are tortured by hunger and diseases in developing countries.

Defensive political violence cannot be successful without activists who have discipline, patience, and knowledge of how to handle weapons properly. That excludes most left wing rebels. They are probably not capable of carrying this burden of responsibility. They will most likely lose control, hurt innocent people, and make fools out of themselves, like they have done many times before. What is needed today are moderate persons, with a strong psyche, who no longer have the conscience to be passive witnesses to a few hundred rich people owning billions of dollars while 10 million kids die each year of poverty.

We need police men, ambulance workers, fire fighters, UN peace keepers and others who have the courage to focus on the most important work today: saving children’s lives. If it can be proven that militant operations in defence of these children are ethically and judicially justified, then people should take up arms and do some serious rescue work, because the lives of countless human beings depend on it.

Athletes, hunters, and mountaineers, for instance, can also help out. What if extreme sport athletes realised that it is better to risk their lives in a militant operation instead of risking it during mountain climbing or parachuting? Why not use that need for adrenaline to do some good for others?

It will be objected that one must be out of touch with reality if one honestly believe that policemen and soldiers will ever participate in defensive political violence. But that is not correct. They already do! In Afghanistan they fight against the Taliban, and during the September 11 attacks they tried to protect innocent people from political fanatics. Of course, they will not condone defensive political violence if it is not justifiable. But what if Habermas, Zygmunt Bauman, and the finest minds at universities like Harvard and Oxford can’t show that it is illegal or unethical to capture some of the richest persons in the world and force them to give aid to millions of dying children? What if defensive political violence can be justified by the ethics of Aristotle, Thomas of Aquinas, Kant, Mill, and Levinas? Then we are naive enough to believe that courageous soldiers and police officers will do what is right.

But if they refuse, what will you do? How many lives have you saved? What have you done in your life to really feel proud?