Courage and Cancellation

Before I forget them, here are just a few things that popped into my aging brain this morning on the drive home after Mass. I had some errands to run — fill the car with gas, buy milk and cream — so my mind was wonderfully empty and open to deeper thoughts. I’d considered praying the Rosary as I drove but knew I wouldn’t have time to complete five decades and I never like stopping in the middle…so my attention wandered.

I found myself thinking about a young woman, born in North Korea, who ultimately escaped via China, Mongolia, South Korea, and finally to the United States. I had seen her interviewed on TV the other day, and her courage and wisdom overwhelmed me. In China she and her mother were forced into sex slavery, but she managed to escape, crossed the Gobi Desert into Mongolia, and from there made her way to South Korea. She came to the USA and eventually graduated from Columbia, a university where she encountered a woke American version of the forced leftist orthodoxy she thought she had left behind in North Korea. Her name is Yeonmi Park, and she’s written two books: one about her escape, In Order to Live; and another, While Time Remains. The latter relates her experiences dealing with leftist political indoctrination here in the United States, especially in Academia. She is a remarkable and courageous young woman, and I have ordered both books. I might write about them in a future post. 

Listening to her, though, led me to consider the lack of moral courage, indeed the outright cowardice of so many Americans, especially young college-age Americans. They seem so afraid of being out of sync with the current zeitgeist, so afraid to speak up in defense of truth and what is right, that they succumb to social and psychological pressures, and to the fear of “cancellation”, believing or at best not daring to contradict whatever lies they are told. Because they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated at every educational level, they find if far easier to let others think for them rather than taking the time to study, to learn the truth, and perhaps even to think for themselves. When I consider our young service men and women, who exhibit remarkable physical and moral courage almost daily, I am appalled by the moral cowardice of far too many of the “more educated” among our youth. 

Of course, the indoctrination of our children and young adults plays right into the hands of those who seek to rule us. The young folks are so accustomed to believing everything they are told by their controllers, that the chosen rulers can claim infallibility, even in the face of failure. An abject failure that turns into a deadly fiasco — for example, Afghanistan — is hailed as a huge success and the woke media and party-lime politicians just rave about it. And the more such things occur, the more often truth is hidden behind lies, the more the workers and drones in the hive actually come to believe what they’re saying. 

The only solution is to speak the truth always, regardless of the consequences. That’s really the best definition of moral courage.