In a time when "leadership" and "courage" tend to mean telegenic "charisma" and self-important political posturing by celebrities addressing the like-minded and sycophantic, it doesn't hurt to remember acts of extraordinary human accomplishment in the face of genuine threat.
Today is Battle of Britain day in the UK.
It has long been fashionable for a certain class of insecure "intellectual" to dismiss such commemorations as jingoistic chest-thumping - lacking "nuance", celebrating outmoded ideas of patiotism, sacrifice and service.
But that luxury to indulge in our modern redefinitions of "hero" and forget the meaning of real courage was bought over the skies of Britain in the fall of 1940 by Hugh Dowding and the RAF.
69 years ago, a few thousand young men - and their extraordinary nation - were part of one of the truly critical moments in the history of Western civilization.
Churchill, of course, had it right.
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
