Bill Kristol offers a meditation on courage, terrorism and U.S. debt:
By the end of the 1980s, it seemed Solzhenitsyn had been too pessimistic. In an impressive showing of moral courage and civic strength, the societies of the West confronted in that decade the threats of decadence at home and weakness abroad. Leaders like Reagan and Thatcher, John Paul II and Lech Walesa discovered reservoirs of moral virtue in their publics and rallied them to action.The threats of 2010 are as great as those of 1980. They are intellectually different, of courseâ??and perhaps even more complicated. But, like the threats of the Cold War, they cannot be overcome if we lack the simple and often prosaic virtue of courage."
I think the distinction between 1980 and the USSR and 2010 and the threats we face today is quite a bit more than "intellectual." One situation involved a threat capable of, in a matter of hours, leveling our major cities and industrial centers and killing tens of millions of Americans. The other doesn't.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't take contemporary threats to our security very seriously. Obviously we should. But if we're discussing this in the context of courage it would seem to me that it's the antithesis of courage to magnify what is otherwise relatively small.
