OT: Courage

[CDRERamius@xxxxxxx]

Just an article I was sent by a friend. It got me thinking about courage. A 
lot of people talk about courage when talking about Xander, Buffy, Willow and 
Giles. I think this may throw a little light on the subject. This was taken 
from an Australian paper and talks about mostly Aussie examples. But there 
are equally worthy stories of courage across the globe.


Brave hearts - smh.com.au - Spectrum

Saturday, March 3, 2001
Brave hearts 

The soldier, the freedom fighter, the kamikaze pilot, the dying 
mother, the runner ... what is that elusive thing called courage? 
Tony Stephens seeks to unravel the mystery.

Cathy Freeman's latest international honour, presented last month, 
is the Arthur Ashe Courage and Humanitarian Award. The runner won 
for her role in highlighting Aboriginal issues and the way in which 
she "dealt with the weight of an entire nation" at the Olympic Games 
in Sydney. Maureen Murray Quinn, in announcing the award, said: "Her 
spirit and deeds serve powerfully to remind us that Arthur's ideals 
live on and that, again, one person's actions can boldly impact on 
the entire population."
Andrew Jackson, a former president of the United States, put it 
similarly: "One man with courage makes a majority."

Courage is hard to define. It takes some sort of courage to take an 
injection from a dentist, or to take a calculated risk by betting on 
one's convictions in the Melbourne Cup, or to invest in an IT 
company, or to take off one's clothes in public. It takes another 
sort of courage to enlist for war, or to decide not to fight. 
Colonel Eli Geva ruined a promising Israeli military career by 
refusing to order his troops into Beirut in 1982. "I don't have the 
courage to look straight into the eyes of bereaved parents and tell 
them their son fell in an operation which I believe we can do 
without," he said.

Arthur Ashe was courageous in his battle against the odds of his 
background to become the first black American to win the Wimbledon 
men's singles championship. He was courageous in his dignified 
struggle against the HIV virus, which he contracted through a 
transfusion of contaminated blood.

Cathy Freeman's courage is rooted in her having overcome family and 
racial upheaval. Freeman's grandmother had been taken from her 
family and moved to Palm Island. Freeman's mother was, in turn, 
taken from Palm Island. Yet the athlete survived to become world 
400-metres champion. Then, with the nation troubled over the 
question of reconciliation between indigenous and other Australians, 
she won the Olympic gold medal. There can never have been another 
minute like this in Australian history, when so many millions at 
Homebush Bay, in their homes and in public places focused their will 
and good wishes on one young person. Freeman courageously carried a 
nation's soul on her back.

Asked recently to nominate three particularly courageous people I'd 
met, I suggested, without very much thought, Nelson Mandela, Weary 
Dunlop and Sandra Lindh who, at 28, had three children and was dying 
of cancer in Canberra. Lindh hated the idea of leaving her husband 
and children behind but she laughed a lot. She laughed about having 
a breast removed: "I'm built like a broomstick, anyhow." And she 
sang in her pain The Beatles' Let It Be: 

When I find myself in times of trouble,
Mother Mary comes to me.
Speaking words of wisdom,
Let it be.

All of this might have been a defence mechanism against the dying of 
the light but Sandra Lindh's behaviour was that of an extraordinarily 
courageous woman.

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in jail for his battle against 
apartheid, emerging as one of last century's great champions of the 
human spirit. He had the courage to forgive his oppressors and the 
courage to change himself and his supporters so that they could sit 
down with their jailers. "One of the most difficult things is not so 
much to change society," he said in Sydney last year, "but to change 
ourselves."

Dunlop, the great soldier-surgeon, was tortured and prepared three 
times for death on the infamous Burma-Thailand railway. Once, he 
said his captor could kill him, but then he would have to kill the 
officer who succeeded him, then the man after that, then the next, 
then the next. Japanese guards wanted to kill Bill Griffiths, a 
prisoner-of-war, after he was blinded and lost both arms, but Weary 
stepped between the raised bayonet and the helpless target, with a 
lesson about human dignity. "When despair and death reached for us, 
he stood fast," said Donald Stuart, another prisoner of war. "Faced 
with guards who had the power of life and death, ignoble tyrants who 
hated us, he was a lighthouse of sanity in a universe of madness and 
suffering."

Sir Ninian Stephen said at Weary's funeral service: "To many, his 
dedication to all that was good and his own sheer nobility of 
character seemed saintly; they set him apart." The Rev James 
Donaldson said Weary was Christ-like because he forgot himself to 
care for others and because he forgave his captors. "His behaviour 
was straight out of the Sermon on the Mount."

Yet Dunlop's courage is just as well illustrated by Dr Max Lake's 
story: "Weary discovered a man tampering with his car. When 
challenged, he made his first mistake by taking off. Weary had a 
blue for running. He made his second mistake by trying to dodge. 
Weary was a football blue and tackled him. He made his final and 
most serious mistake by shaping up and having a go. Weary had a blue 
for boxing and broke his jaw. Weary then gathered him up, drove him 
to hospital, set his jaw and arranged for the discharge and review 
of the patient at the next convenient outpatient clinic."

After the war, Dunlop resumed his career as a surgeon and teacher, 
becoming a leader in cancer treatment. He also built bridges of 
understanding to Asia. Like Mandela, he demonstrated that the truest 
evil men could do would never overcome the best that men could do.

Former prime minister Paul Keating has made the point that the Anzac 
legend is not of sweeping military victories so much as triumphs 
against the odds, of courage and ingenuity in adversity. Dunlop is a 
good example. Australians are much more likely to remember him than 
Diver Derrick, who fought with distinction at Tobruk, won a 
Distinguished Conduct Medal at Tel el Eisa in Egypt and the VC in 
New Guinea for single-handedly wiping out 10 enemy machine-gun posts 
in previously impenetrable jungle. Shot in Borneo, he continued 
directing his troops before dying. He had said, when ordered to 
withdraw: "Bugger the CO."

Derrick was courageous in the mould of Albert Jacka, who attacked a 
Turkish trench at Gallipoli single-handed, killed nine men and won 
the Victoria Cross. Yet, when asked about Gallipoli, Australians are 
much more likely to mention Simpson and his donkey, the courageous 
saviours, rather than Jacka, the courageous killer.

And how does one measure the courage of the men who enlisted against 
that of their women who stayed at home? During World War I, when so 
many men volunteered from Australian country towns, the women were 
left to raise the children and run the farms, shops and virtually 
the town itself. If their men came home when it was all over, the 
women often had to nurse them back to physical and mental health, 
suffering in silence.

William Ian Miller, professor of law at the University of Michigan, 
asks some of these questions in his new book, The Mystery of 
Courage. Miller set out to write a book on cowardice. He says, 
however: "Courage ... laid siege to my initial intentions and 
succeeded in breaching them with ease. No wonder cowardice gave way; 
that's what cowardice always does."

Whatever courage is, we are encouraged from an early age to aspire 
to it. The phrases stick through the years. "Courage, brother, do 
not stumble! Though thy path be dark as night," the old hymn urged. 
"God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage 
to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference," Reinhold 
Niebuhr prayed. As Adam Lindsay Gordon wrote: 

Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.

Yet the essential mystery of courage remains. The Japanese Kaiten 
torpedo carried enough explosives to sink an aircraft carrier. A 
human pilot sat behind the warhead. If the Kaiten hit its target, 
the pilot died one kind of death. If it missed, he died through 
starvation, suffocation or self-detonation. Was this courage, 
fanaticism or madness?

Were the actions of the pilots any more courageous than those of 
Hirofumi Konishi? Konishi, a gentle old man who had felt the searing 
pain of war against Australians at Kokoda, came to Australia 10 
years ago to apologise for his nation's behaviour, long before there 
was much talk of a formal Japanese apology. He wanted to make peace 
with "Australian comrades". Australians were not ready for that sort 
of courage. He came back in 1995. This time he made friends.

Tony McD