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Where we're going, we don't need a cape [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-27
When past generations faced an existential challenge, it was not always the one they wished for or daydreamed of, nor the one one they were prepared for. The First World War was not a cavalry charge. Suffrage wasn’t achieved through excelling in learned meekness and manners. Climate change isn't gunning down Nazis. We can only face the challenges in front of us, and with the powers we actually have — our purchasing power as an ordinary consumer, the right to vote, our mastery of our chronic pain, our persuasiveness and wit, imagination, our ability to plan, our compassion - not the ones we wish we had (super strength, wealth, a killer argument, weapons, a band of brothers).
Many who conscientiously pay respect to the supreme bravery and sacrifices of the past are sadly also the people who can’t or won’t unsubscribe from Amazon Prime or forego a damaging luxury one day in the week. That contrast would describe almost every respectable person I grew up with, and most that I still know.
At worst, they've given up already. At best, they're holding out for their romantic, choreographed punch-a-Nazi moment (which won't arrive, because it didn't arrive for most people in Nazi Germany, let alone now). But they won't do a thing when faced with the smallest boring challenges that line up demurely for them today, to be addressed in whatever order is expedient. I don't even know how to describe that inaction pejoratively. It's not even cowardice, because cowardice is idleness in the face of something that's at least actually threatening.
In many ways our personal challenge is easier than we imagined it to be. We won't be judged by our children or grandchildren because we never punched a Nazi. No-one will have expected us to have single-handedly saved someone in peril (though hats off to those that do). We will more likely be judged because we thought bearing any small inconvenience whatsoever, even to help others do the right thing, was intolerable to us.
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