A Fallen People

     Stories built around the concept that we of today are the descendants of far greater ancestors are many. Some are well known. One gave rise to the most beloved adventure novel of all time. Others were fundamental to science fiction’s most honored tales. Still another inspired an insane pseudo-religion. And of course we have this well-known soliloquy from a father to a son:

     The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century migrations from the Old World to the New sorted among Mankind for the courageous. The brave embraced the journey with confidence: in open-eyed expectation of danger and hardship, but eager for the chance to prevail, multiply, and prosper. Those too timorous, or too attached to the comforts of an already-settled continent, remained where they’d been born.

     But as time passed, the progeny of those early settlers proved ever less interested in adventure, ever less willing to bear danger and hardship for the chance to excel.

     Americans are given to talking about “the greatest generation:” our forebears who fought in World War II. Such exalted descriptions aren’t applied to any generation since. The war gave those Americans a kind of glow – and not just the ones who fought. There’s a sense that we’ve lost something since those days. When we review the events of the decades behind us, decades in which we’ve become ever more fearful, averse to confrontation, and pusillanimous about defending ourselves, the notion seems more credible than is pleasant.

     I could tell you stories, Gentle Reader. I could.

     It could almost persuade me that courage is genetically transmitted from father to son… but imperfectly, with a significant chance of failure. If that were so, the mutation that gave rise to courage must have been a strange one indeed. Even stranger that courage was a dominant trait, for a while.

     We all know the litany. “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men, create hard times,” and around and around we go. It seems that hard times are required to reinvigorate us, to bring back that fabled species: “the men who run toward the sound of the guns.” It seems plain that were strong men to fail to arise in response to hard times, the race would die out. Either that, or degenerate to vermin who survive by huddling in fear, and occasionally throwing their weakest to the monsters at the cave’s mouth.

     I write heroes. I always have, and should I return to fiction, I’ll surely do so again. It’s not just to thrill and entertain armchair-bound types who yearn for a source of inspiration. Without heroes, how would our embryonic strong men learn the standard to which they must rise?

     Yet they who prattle to us from high, safe perches do their damnedest to denigrate heroes and tales of heroes. Here’s only one recent example. You’d swear that the existence of courageous men actually threatens them… and perhaps, by revealing their own contemptibility to them, it does just that.

     The prattlers and denigrators have had their way with us for too long. They’ve been appallingly successful at peddling the Gospel of Fear. They’ve had a lot of help from the State. The State is always eager to promote fear and discourage courage. Interesting word, “discourage.” Ponder the etymology for a moment or two.

     And so today, the disincentives to commitment and brave action have almost triumphed over what vestiges of American courage remain to us. “Stay back. Don’t get involved. It’s not your problem. Let the authorities handle it.” The ranks of the men who plunge willingly into danger, who “run toward the sound of the guns,” have dwindled to a pitiful few. To our shame and sorrow, they’re almost gone.

     But not all of them, by God! Not all!