Perhaps all kinds of courage can be arranged into 2 categories: See/Do and Think … Do. The ellipsis marks matter.
See/Do occurs in the moment – the teacher who covers children with her body when the shooter comes into their classroom; the teenage boy who reaches into the burning car to pull out the stranger. In See/Do, there is no time for the imagination to do its insidious work and begin that light whisper – this could happen, you might be hurt, it’s nothing to do with you. No, in See/Do, the body moves faster than the mind. A person steps forward before he or she can do the calculations. That stepping forward is a basic character trait or a gut-felt outrage made manifest in movement, intervention and opposition. I think it is the most common form of courage. Many of us are capable of acting in this way.
Think … Do is the one we wonder about. If the worst happened, would we have this strength?
Think … Do means that we have time to think about what may happen to us if we act. The imagination becomes involved. We must ponder “If’s” – If I do this, how will I suffer? Will others I love be put at risk? What will I stand to lose?
Marina Ovsyannikova, an employee at Channel 1 in Moscow, a Putin propaganda outlet, stepped into the camera space during a live broadcast, shouted “Stop the war. No to war.” She held a sign which read, “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you. Russians against the war.” She said that she was afraid until the last minute.
Knowing she would be arrested, she released a pre-recorded video after this action that explained her motivation.
In a follow-up interview with CNN she said, “I have been feeling a cognitive dissonance, more and more, between my beliefs and what we say on air. The war was the point of no return, when it was simply impossible to stay silent.” She knows that her “life has changed irrevocably.”
When she stepped in front of the camera in that studio, when she released the next video, when she allowed the interview with CNN, she stepped into a void it is very hard for us in America to understand. – she spoke out not only against the invasion of Ukraine, but also against Putin, against lies, against brutality, against State terror. She spoke for ‘the enemy’ and for the most basic of human rights – the right to not be murdered by the State. She said I will no longer be a party to lies and murder.
I don’t think cowardice is the opposite of courage because they can be entangled in the same person – if I know I would do dangerous x in a pinch to save another, but I would never do dangerous y because I know I could not control my fear, am I a coward? The rigid duality of that formula seems false. It lacks human complexity.
No, I think the opposite of courage is the lie – the deliberate, conscious lie that inflames a situation or causes real harm to a person or people or that works in the service of cruelty, terror, murder and immoral power. Such a lie seeks to destroy courage or render it as foolish. Such a lie is a cancerous cynicism that implies that the greatest good is power and that anything may be said or done to achieve such power.
All of these people (and more) have taken up The Lie of Russian blamelessness: Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, the Russian mouthpieces for the Kremlin and their mouthpieces in America who have shown sympathy for or have taken Putin’s side in this conflict — Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Madison Cawthorne, Donald Trump, others.
By spreading and servicing this lie, they embrace cruelty, the chief component of fascism and its pitiless connection to the will to power. They are awful human beings, the worst of us.
In Russia, Marina Ovsyannikova and several thousand other Russians, and in Ukraine, numberless men and women, are resisting the Russian onslaught through actions large and small. They form a universe of courage of both the See/Do and Think … Do variety. They are the best of us.
