A rather long article about courage, and fighting for what you believe in. (And if you don’t like reading, there’s an audio version available on the link).
Most (most, not all) of this works even if you replace America with India, btw.
A few key quotes (that worked for me, might not work for you – read/listen to the whole thing for yourself to decide):
- One of the core lessons of what’s happening right now in Ukraine is that fighting for noble causes matters—indeed, it is the only thing that matters. It can mean the difference between life and death. Between freedom and slavery.
- The first is that one can acknowledge the lies and the hypocrisies of our experts and our institutions. I do. But acknowledging it says nothing about the reality that Russia is actually bombing maternity hospitals. That it is killing journalists.
And if you have hardened yourself to that—if you hate us or part of us more than you hate that—then you have lost the plot. Then you are justifying the unjustifiable.
The second thing is that you can oppose the lies and the hypocrisies without giving up on America and its exceptional proposition. Indeed, the way to recover America isn’t to become moral relativists or isolationists or apologists for evil. It’s to look our moral and practical failings in the face and fix them.
- societies that are conquered from outside can recover. But societies that destroy themselves from within cannot.
- Reckoning with the flaws and failings of past generations, grappling with our history are part of the civilization for which we are fighting. But that cannot be confused for a second with the zeal to purge and purify, to cancel and punish and tear down, to the nihilists who say we have to repudiate the tools that allow us to improve and progress and forgive. The tools that have made our civilization the freest in all of history.
- There are people who fought very hard for the freedoms and privileges that we have. And a lot of Americans are using those freedoms to turn on other Americans. To suggest that disagreeing about the war makes them traitors.
Others are sleepwalking. Giving them up without a second thought. That’s what Putin and the rest of the world’s tyrants are counting on. They are counting on the fact that the superpower that considers receiving groceries in under an hour its major achievement won’t interrupt a good online sale for anyone else’s sake.
(In this point, replace America with India, and see what happens to your worldview)
Unjustly 