Memes by Themes #26: Cowardice
The greatest threat facing humanity isn’t tyranny, democide, genocide, or war.
It’s cowardice.
Because none of these atrocities would be possible without the complicity of cowardly colluders and narrative-believers.
Cowardice may seem an odd topic to choose for Memorial Day, when we in the United States take a moment to honor those who bravely sacrificed their lives for our country.
But the best way to illuminate courage is to demonstrate how painfully rare it is—“like shining from shook foil,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes.
Unfortunately, we have an abundance of examples to paint that picture—clocking in at 156 memes plus videos and a pulverizing song written by Rebecca Charles Jackson, who is fighting for justice for her hospicided daughter, Danielle.
Rebecca and I have spent a lot of time contemplating how the forty-four1 staff members she is suing along with Northwell Health Hospital could not only sit by but actively participate in causing Danielle’s deterioration from a healthy, joyous girl to a bloated, pallid corpse over the course of forty brutal days of medical torture.
This is an old and familiar question with an old and familiar answer: cowardice.
As Rebecca writes in Courage Comes from the Heart: Standing up for What Is Right and Facing the Darkness for a Better Tomorrow:
To the cowards who enjoy the bounty of freedom and prosperity while their fellow men and women die in hospitals and deadly medical protocols at the hands that swore to heal them: your silence is complicity. You turn away so you can keep your comfort and social standing. But evil thrives when good men and women do nothing and the next crisis is already approaching.
We stand at the same crossroads today. Millions of lives were taken in U.S. hospitals during the COVID and the Covid-19 shots, and the pattern will not stop unless we find the courage to say No to medical tyranny and enslavement.
Today, I planned to attend the dedication of a newly erected Vietnam Memorial Wall in Oregon featuring each of the 58,479 names on the Washington, DC, Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
I’ve only gotten three and a half hours of sleep, though, so I decided to skip the speeches and pay my respects quietly later.
While contemplating the sobering wall, I thought about Gerard Van der Leun’s Name in the Stone. The namesake of my dear departed friend and editor of American Digest, the original Gerard died in the North Atlantic at age twenty-one during World War II.
One day in 1975 while enjoying a Coke and hot dog in Battery Park, the younger Gerard found himself propped up against a monument:
I remember that the stone was cool against my back as I sat there looking at the stone across from me on that warm afternoon. As I looked up it dawned on me that the words cut into the stones were all names. Just names. The names of soldiers, sailors, and airmen who had met their death in the North Atlantic in WWII. I was to learn later that there were 4,601 names. All lost in the frigid waters, all without any marker for their graves—except those in the hearts of those they left behind, and their names carved into these stones that rose up around me.
I read across several rows, moving right to left, then down a row, and then right to left. I got to the end of the sixth row and went back to the beginning of the seventh row.
At the beginning of the seventh row, I read the name: “Gerard Van der Leun.” My name. Cut into the stone amongst a tally of the dead.
Today is a good day to read his whole knee-buckling account. It is the essay he wanted to be remembered for, and you will see why.
Those of us who have read the words of the propagandists matter-of-factly explaining how they dupe people into sacrificing themselves for abstractions on behalf of invisible forces might be inclined to look askance at soldiers, pitying them for their gullibility.
But that patronizing, self-righteous attitude fails to acknowledge the rarefied courage it requires for individuals to put their lives where their principles are. It is not a textbook exercise but hardcore reality—and far, far too often, their bravery is cashed on the battlefield.
Maybe some of them they died for a lie, a racket, and the cruelites’ coffers, but they didn’t know that. They fought for goodness, honor, and liberty—our liberty.
And I am grateful. I am grateful for the Constitution they defended with their lives. I am grateful for the republic whose flag they pledged allegiance to. I am grateful for the liberal democratic principles on which this nation was founded.
I am grateful to those soldiers who realize they are what stands between citizens and totalitarianism and that when tyranny is in vogue, it is their Duty to Disobey.
And this is why it is important to shame the cowards. Tyranny-enablers are motivated by approbation, conformity, and comfort. Against them, humiliation is our greatest weapon.
But once their ego crumbles, we need to greet them with love, ready to encourage their climb to greater heights—from laziness to strength, from fragility to resilience, from cowardice to courage as they embark on the journey toward BECOMING UNHERDABLE.
