Sunday, August 09, 2009

Now, That's What Courage Means

Nothing's stopping this guy. Nothing. As long as he possibly can, no matter what the new, inconvenient reality, he's going back to finish the job.

A BRITISH soldier who had part of his leg blown off by a landmine is preparing to return to Afghanistan to settle “unfinished business” with the Taliban.

Private Matt Woollard, 20, is expected to be the first British infantryman to return to the front line after being fitted with a prosthetic limb.

Woollard, a member of 1st Battalion, the Royal Anglian Regiment, lost his lower right leg after setting off an insurgent bomb while on patrol near Kajaki in May 2007. His heart stopped three times while he was receiving treatment.

“I want to get back and do what I was sent to Afghanistan to do in 2007 — take the fight to the Taliban,” Woollard told The Sunday Times.

Folks like Mr. Woollard set an excellent example for the rest of us.

And send all the right signals to those who think that the Free World is weak and submissive.

It's better to be courageous and determined and to show it openly and brazenly than to back off whenever the going gets a little tougher and more challenging.

Better to show strength and determination than to send the message to greedy, evil folks that you're a sitting duck to be casually, effortlessly popped off.

There is a reason why we observe remembrance.

Unfortunately, there are many comfortable, sheltered folks who prefer not to worry about the real world and about making sure it's not going to become, well, like 1938-1945 all over again (and don't forget that the bad guys now have nukes and they must be deemed as actually plotting to use them).

There are folks who don't want to believe that the Free World could be attacked, invaded, occupied and that they, personally, their families and friends, could be oppressed, tyrannized, enslaved, tortured, murdered... They just don't want to care; they don't want to make the time and put in the effort to use their brains, to gather real, hard information about the real world, to understand what it all means. They're just too mentally lazy. They don't believe it's possible to know a singular reality. They prefer to believe that there is no one reality, that there's multiple "realities" created by the perceptions, beliefs and opinions of the billions of folks in the world, and that they're all equally true. They really believe that they know the real world, though they really don't. So closed-minded, so myopic. Too easy to not think harder, longer; too easy, and that's a negative thing.

But there are those who understand that there's so much more to the real world than we immediately notice. They know that things are going on that we don't see right away, that the Big Media won't report to us. And those wide-awake, aware, alert, prepared-to-act folks are the ones who truly deserve respect.

Winston Churchill told the world what he observed and understood to be going on, and what he saw imminently happening. But the lazy-minded, blisfully-ignorant didn't understand, so they instinctively thought he was just a loony, a crank, a nut. Boy, did they soon regret their arrogance and ignorance, eh!