Tag: courage

Shavuot, Ruth and Me

 

Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back, and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your G-d my G-d. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and more may the Lord do to me if anything but death parts me from you. –Ruth, 1:16

When I became ill with cancer a couple of years ago, my close Jewish friends asked me if I had a Hebrew name, which would have been given to me when I was a newborn. I seemed to remember learning that I had a Hebrew name, but I don’t remember what it was. My Jewish friends felt that their prayers for me to G-d would be more powerful if they prayed using my Hebrew name, so I asked my friend @iwe if anything could be done regarding my lack of a Hebrew name, and he consulted his rabbi. It turns out that if a person doesn’t have a Hebrew name, he or she may choose one. On hearing this information, I knew immediately that I wanted to take the name of Ruth.

Member Post

 

Has the battle, and the war, been lost already? Can anyone honestly say the depravity and, dare I say, sheer wickedness and evil be stopped? Disfiguring the bodies of CHILDREN to satisfy some perverted minor segment of the population? Of course, the greater crime is the warping, twisting, and mangling of those children’s MINDS! I […]

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Quote of the Day: On Courage

 

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.” – G.K. Chesterton

This is Memorial Day weekend. Although the traditional start of summer, Memorial Day has a serious purpose. It is not the day we honor our veterans. It is the day we honor those that died in the service of our country, those who gave “the last full measure of devotion.”

Quote of the Day: Courage

 

God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.  – Chester Nimitz

It is easy to look at what is going on in the world and feel despair. Things look hopeless. Crime seems out of control, inflation is running wild, there are shortages of life’s necessities, and a real possibility of a nuclear exchange exists. Some days you feel like going back to bed and crawling into a fetal ball.

Quote of the Day: Regrets for the People I Couldn’t Save

 

“It was my duty to shoot the enemy, and I don’t regret it. My regrets are for the people I couldn’t save: Marines, soldiers, buddies. I’m not naive, and I don’t romanticize war. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL. But I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job.” – Chris Kyle

Tragically, Chris Kyle died at the age of 38 at the hands of a man he was trying to help after he had left the military; he was shot by this ex-Marine who had a long history of mental illness.

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how we try to influence and have an impact on the lives of others. When we get caught up in the day-to-demands of life, it’s easy to forget that every day we have the opportunity to make a difference in another person’s reality.

Quote of the Day: Courage

 

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” – Winston Churchill

Churchill is right on both counts. It takes courage to stand up and speak, especially when your words go counter to today’s conventional and delivered wisdom. That goes double, or maybe triple in today’s cancel culture, when speaking the truth could cost you your job and your fortune, and turn you into an outcast.  There is too little of that going on today, although there is beginning to be more of it.

QotD: Courage, Liberty, and Happiness

 

Those who won our independence . . . believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. – Justice Louis Brandeis

If any single quote summarizes the cause of our present unhappiness, it is this one. Without liberty, one cannot be happy. Without courage, one cannot be free. Today far too many lack the courage required for liberty. They lack the courage to speak freely, to take the consequences of defying absurd edicts and to disregard specious arguments made by so-called experts. They fear to go their own way and defy the mob. It is easier to go along, to not make waves.

Truly Brave: 1968 Olympics Women’s Gymnastics Champion

 

Vera Caslavska 1968 brave gymnastI started writing this in the hours after American gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from the Olympic women’s team competition. Then I let it sit to see what the rest of the story might be. From the beginning, I found that Simone Biles, at age 24, was on track to be the second oldest women’s all-around Olympic champion. This naturally led to the oldest modern Olympic women’s all-around gymnastics champion, who won at the age of 26 in Mexico in 1968. The Czechoslovakian Věra Čáslavská, one of only two two-time all-around Olympic champions in women’s gymnastics, performed under far more real pressure, with far more real courage, facing far more real consequences than any athlete in Tokyo.

Simone Biles

Simone Biles approached the 2020 (2021) Olympic Games as the defending all-around champion and the heavy favorite to repeat. She performed well in events leading up to Tokyo. Indeed, she landed a new, very difficult move on the floor exercise months before these Olympics.

Jealousy: The Real Root of All Evil

 

Think money is the root of all evil?  Wrong. It isn’t. Granted, it’s right up there with the major players, and certainly worthy enough, but the real problem is jealousy.  Jealousy starts wars, ends marriages, kills friendships, jobs and industries.  Seriously. Jealousy is the root of all evil.

While money is a regular passenger on the Jealousy Express, it’s not the driver. And, nowhere in the Ten Commandments is money mentioned.  It’s implicit, sure, but jealousy is the inherent antagonist: Thou shall not steal…anything…not just cash. Now, not coveting your neighbor’s wife or goods…bingo!  That’s where the utterly repugnant and deservedly maligned jealousy thing takes center stage.

Gov. Ron DeSantis Defies the Media and the Federal Government

 

Republican governors all over the country are taking care of their states regarding Covid-19 to mixed reviews. At least most of them aren’t crippling their economies or insisting on lockdowns. I can’t help bragging about Florida’s governor, however, because he does whatever he thinks is necessary—and he’s faced an irate CDC and has been denounced by the media.

Let me tell you about Ron DeSantis. While Gov. Andrew Cuomo was signing the death warrants for hundreds of senior citizens in New York when he sent them into nursing homes, Ron DeSantis protected the nursing homes until it was clear that residents could safely be visited. He has also defied the recommendations of Dr. Anthony Fauci, knowing that the good doctor wasn’t using the science at all, nor good sense, but was making political decisions. Most recently DeSantis was chastised for two decisions: the first was deciding to prioritize vaccines for the elderly. According to Peacock Network, this was clearly a political decision. I guess targeting the most vulnerable group is considered high politics.

A second decision was criticized when the governor set up “pop-up” vaccination centers in Manatee County for a community of elderly residents. (We had a similar vaccination center set-up in our 55+ community, and vaccinations were limited to those 65+.) He was criticized for ignoring federal guidelines and decided to offer vaccinations to the most vulnerable. I guess the critics believed that old people were more likely to vote Republican.

Quote of the Day: Cowardice

 

“When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.” ― Eric Hoffer

So, has cowardice become a fashion? The excessive timidity over Covid suggests it may well have. So, too, do increased reports of police not just ceasing to be proactive about policing – spending time avoiding getting into “situations.” But it has gone beyond that, with police refusing to make arrests of violent and dangerous criminals for fear of the adverse reaction should the perpetrator receive his just desserts when resisting arrest.

Quote of the Day: Such Men

 

“Where do we get such men? They leave this ship and they do their job. Then they must find this speck lost somewhere on the sea. When the find it they have to land on its pitching deck. Where do we get such men?” — RAdm. George Tarrant in The Bridges at Toko Ri, James Michener

The Bridge at Toko Ri was a novella Michener wrote in 1953. at the end of the Korean War. Set during that war, one of its themes was the question of whether the generation that became adults after World War II had the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the challenges of those times. Some felt that this new generation lacked the courage, the endurance, and the determination of the men who had fought World War II. They were weak and would fail, those people thought.

Heroes Fighting Cancel Culture

 

So many of you have inspired me with your posts of the people, companies, and organizations fighting back against cancel culture. In some ways, the number of people who speak out seems small; every time I see a new person, I keep wishing there were more; I’ve decided I want to have one place I can go and periodically review a list of them, to remind myself there are many more than I’ve realized.

Also, I’m sure there are some people whom we’ve missed, even people in our own personal universe, who’ve risked their lives, reputations, and jobs but speak out anyway. So, I’m going to list a few of those who have heartened me through their actions and courage. And I hope you’ll add to the list!

One of the most difficult institutions to call out are the universities. Several employees at universities have been singled out and are fighting back:

Taking Back Academia Begins with the States

 

Academia is broken and needs reform. Much of higher education is thoroughly corrupted by ideology and groupthink, including the STEM Departments, and instead of educated, well-rounded national and global citizens and scholars, are churning out mindlessly chanting, self-righteous, totalitarian, and censorious ignoramuses.

Clearly, just waiting for employment and taxation {chortle} to rectify so many years of maleducation and indoctrination is not a solution. Therefore, more active measures are needed.

Quote of the Day: Courage

 

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature, which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How much of our government today is marked by a lack of courage? We see it most clearly in the response to the COVID-19 epidemic. The states, counties, and cities whose leaders are most frightened are the ones maintaining the lockdown longest. Especially the politicians who fear the electorate and mistrust the common sense of the average person.

Group Writing: Do You Believe in ‘If’ Anymore?

 

One of the reasons I like the occasional music posts on Ricochet is that I’ve spent most of my life quite disconnected from whatever was going on in the contemporary entertainment world, and the posts give me a window into what I might have missed (and whether or not I’m glad I did). Although we moved to the United States only a couple of months before The Beatles took the “Ed Sullivan Show” by storm, I never owned a Beatles album. And while The Rolling Stones were hot during my years at British boarding school, we weren’t allowed to listen to them; Mick Jagger’s hips and lips being (in the opinion of the good ladies running The Abbey School) a bridge too far, even for the radio.

Prior to that, my experience ran to the blue wind-up gramophone in Nigeria and the 78, 45, and 33RPM records we’d either brought with us from England or borrowed from the Officers’ Club, and programs such as Desert Island Discs on the BBC World Service. After that, with a few notable exceptions when I would, in a transgressive mood, listen to Jeff Christie on KQV, the most youth-oriented local AM station (he later resumed his birth name and achieved some measure of fame as Rush Limbaugh), I left the music scene to others, and largely ignored it myself.

Thus, in the ’60s and ’70s, what did manage to seep into my musical gestalt was mostly the stuff my mother listened to or played on the gramophone–a world largely comprised of male crooners and peppy young women singing cheerful and upbeat songs. Almost all of them were British, and you’ve probably heard of them rarely, if at all. Men like Val Doonican. Matt Munro (best known for the title song of the movie Born Free), Des O’Connor, Frankie Vaughan. Women like Alma Cogan, Cilla Black Clodagh Rodgers, and Sandie Shaw. (Sometimes, when Mum was in a jazz sort of mood, Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine.)

Member Post

 

Earl sat catty-corner to me in the large black chair that he always sat in with the meditation group. His thumb and index finger cradled his chin as he nodded his head. I could sense the change in his listening; rather than preparing what he would say next, he was reflecting on my words and […]

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