Courage

I have a beautiful friend. She is a truth teller. And whenever she speaks, I hear the courage in her words and feel more courageous to speak my own truths. Risky. Will you still want to love me? Will you slip me into a convenient jars labeled bigot, chauvinist, sexist, simple, weak?

Aren’t all forms of courage about risk? Truth teller, artist, rock-climber, and that fearful voice hiding behind the school desk, red faced, throbbing, rising to the blackboard to show herself, himself, zits and all.

I assume you too crossed the college level history river, jumping from person to person, pebble to pebble. History created and told via the forceful personalities of the time. Inherent in this idea is that an individual can change the course of human history. Yet when I feel into my narrow sphere of influence, family and friends, it is clear that history will not be nudged one way or the other, no matter how virtuous my being. No false modesty there, but while thinking about the idea that one man with courage makes a majority, that courageous action makes that thing a reality, I came across two fabulous stories. And I can’t get them out of my head. Indulge me. 2 short stories.

Matthew Meselson is now 92 years old. In the 60’s when the Cold War was at it’s height, we were desperately looking for ways to destroy one another. Bio-chemical weapons were so much cheaper than nuclear and when Prof. Meselson heard that anthrax was being developed for military use, he started to resist. He realized that creating a cheap tool of mass destruction would put us all in harms way and wrote to every science writer in America urging them to run stories. He went on television and on the radio and studied up so he could win debates with people who supported the US’s bio-weapons program. He got thousands of scientists to sign a petition against biological weapons.

By the end of the decade, he got Nixon to cancel the US biological weapons offensive program and endorse an international ban on biological and chemical weapons signed by around 180 countries in 1972 and 1993. Serious Saint material.

The other of my daily heroes is Vasili Arkhipov. On a different level though. He was one of three commanders on a nuclear armed Soviet submarine flotilla during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It happened that the US surface fleet had located the flotilla and were closing in. The Soviet submarines had fled into deeper waters and lost radio signal. In their distress they did not know if war had been declared or not. They felt the drop charges of the American fleet, coming after them. It was very tempting to blow the US fleet to smithereens by dispatching their nuclear warheads. But protocol demanded all three of the commanders unanimously agree to give the order. The two other commanders thought that war must have been declared and their duty was to fire. Vasili Arkhipov refused until confirmation would be clear when radio contact was restored. The flotilla surfaced, shamefaced at being discovered by the Americans, and headed home.

If he had given in to the pressure of his colleagues, we would not be here today. Nuclear war would have ensued and made our worst nightmares look like fairy tales.

Arkhipov resisted the pressures of his colleagues and averted mass destruction. That was a moment in time. But Meselson created and sustained a new movement of resistance that would eventually avert mass destruction with biological weapons. I love them both.

This is about as much as I want to write and probably more than you want to read today.

Hold on, and this probably fits in another blog. But remember the idea floated by Biden during the presidential debates around climate change? He offered that he would compensate small scale farmers in Brazil $20 billion per year for loss of income in exchange for leaving the Amazon Forest intact? Brazil’s Minister of the Environment Ricardo Sales recently agreed to stop all burning and compensate farmers for the opportunity cost in exchange for 12 billion dollars a year. Absolute bargain. We print that much in a few days. Crazy value. But we are all distracted right now it seems.

Courage is a decision to act. Hard, messy and complicated as it may be. Each day again and again. As I sit in my insular and awesome drum circle, I am in no position to point fingers. I can barely summon the courage to start a new beat let alone sustain one.

But that beauty, the truth teller friend of mine could be a Vasili...you never can tell.