I saw the movie Captain America recently and it got me thinking about the whole notion of courage. Thinking about courage took me back to my childhood days, when I read Profiles in Courage, a popular book in the early 60’s written by John F. Kennedy.
As an elementary school kid, I was bored silly with Profiles in Courage. It didn’t seem to me that the people Kennedy wrote about – John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and others – were courageous. After all, they didn’t go to war like Captain America or beat up the bad guys like Batman.
In my little grade-school mind, I thought, “What makes Daniel Webster a hero?” Webster and the other men talked about in the book didn’t risk their lives - all they did was support ideas that were politically very unpopular at the time. Big deal, I thought.
Fast forward to the year 2011. I get what courage is all about now. Yes, it’s exciting to see Captain America wipe out hundreds of Nazis and save the world. But that’s fantasy courage. The real courage in that movie was in the first half hour. Every day was a challenge for skinny, 98-pound weakling Steve Rogers. Even when he was getting beat senseless by a bully twice as big as him because of his opinion, he never backed down; instead he said “I can do this all day.” That’s courage.
Of course, there’s “movie courage” and real-life courage. We don’t have to go to the movies to see examples of real courage.
What about the middle-aged accountant who won’t go along with the dishonest bookkeeping practices of his company, thus putting his job in jeopardy during hard times when finding a new job is difficult to impossible? Or the single mom who gets up at 5 AM, packs the kids off to school or daycare, works a nine-hour day and then comes home to spend the evening with her kids, goes to bed exhausted and then gets up and does it again the next day?
There are real-life examples of courage going on around us, and in our own lives, each and every day.
Unfortunately, I think there’s a void in courage where we desperately need it right now. Our politicians are too worried about protecting their special interest backers to stick their necks out and make the right decisions.
The problem is that courage is often a lonely place. In my latest book Slaying Season, the two heroes discover a cover-up and a terrible injustice. They must make the decision to either “go with the flow” or expose the cover-up and right the wrong. Being heroes in a novel, of course they make the right choice.
I wish real life could be that way.
Slaying Season is available in paperback, Kindle, Nook and on Smashwords. Go to http://www.slayingseason.com for links.
