Just how prepared are you to take a stand when your values, your freedoms, your family, or finances are on the line?
To help you answer this question, I’d like to share a few excerpts from Naomi Wolf’s latest book, The Bodies of Others, on resistance. As a nationally recognized journalist whose articles have appeared in mainstream (leftist) publications, Wolf fell out of favor with her left-leaning followers after daring to question the official Covid and vaccine ‘science.’ Since Wolf’s exile from her woke tribe, she soon found herself increasingly in the same marginalized camp of the ‘far right.’ We have much to learn from her story and brave example.
In early March 2022, while researching her book, she interviewed a whistleblower about the deaths from vaccines, knowing it would put his career in great danger.
I asked him where he got his personal courage. He replied with something like “I will keep going until we either win our freedoms back or I’m in a gulag.” I understood this is truly a time in history for the hammering out of heroes and heroines in the forge of crisis. And so it is also a time of cowardice, when those who choose collusion when they know better, or allowing their souls to shrivel in that same heat for a year and a half once it became clear that this crisis was never about the virus but rather about a global bid to kill off our free world and suppress all of our freedoms.
Courage comes from knowing what is really at stake. Here, the loss of our freedoms. In interviewing other brave souls, she leveled this criticism toward those who remain on the sidelines.
I am beyond exasperated by those who stay in the shadows, while agreeing with the risk-taking of others … as being somehow naturally better fitted for this difficult job. It’s a form of guiltlessly offloading personal responsibility. But there is no room left to equivocate. There is no room left to move about in the middle. At this point there is no middle.
As Wolf points out, heroes are not born, but forged from ordinary citizens willing to place their careers on the line; truckers, parents, nurses, students.
I saw these parents put their bodies between middle schoolers and the vans parked in the schoolyards where miners were to be injected against their parents’ wishes with an experimental product the serious harms of which had been scrupulously concealed. But, of course, the real question is not what drives such parents to put their bodies between the van and the kids. Rather, it is where the heck are all the other parents?
I’m wondering the same thing, about parents here in the Magic Valley. Wolf sheds some light on why so many are MIA. Wolf says while every parent is called to do the right thing, not all are willing to answer the call to courage.
Such heroes and heroines … would rather have been almost anywhere else at work or enjoying their families free of the need to face down bullies and stand up to security guards. But unlike most others, they understood that they were called to rise to this moment. The thing is we are all called, for this is a time when we all need to be at least somewhat brave.
What separates the courageous from the complacent?
The fact is, I don’t know anyone heroic who likes the current battle. But what separates the heroic from the rest is knowing in a moment when obvious right and wrong have not been so clear. You always hear heroes saying, “I had no choice,” or, “I was just doing my job.” Heroes and heroines are right: they are just doing their jobs. They are doing their jobs as human beings with responsibilities to others.
Heroic doctors she interviewed said,
I realized that many of my peers were silent because they were worried about their careers, but I also realized that if I didn’t speak out soon, I would have no career worth saving.
If I did not speak out what was the point of my career in public health doctor?
Courage begets courage
Watching these brave people made Naomi braver than she would have been by herself. She recounts the story of informing the staff at a local coffee shop that she would not comply with the New York City mandates against sitting at the lunch counter reserved for vaccinated patrons only:
The staff warned that they would call the manager. I said that I understood. I then sat down at the illegal lunch counter texted my lawyer to be on standby. I waited for an hour heart pounding to be arrested. Do you know what happened? Nothing.
I knew that day had given me the courage to prove something I believe was important enough to take a personal risk to demonstrate. I would not have known how to be brave without having witnessed their greater bravery who are those standing up now, speaking out and taking risks against encroaching tyranny.
Working class heroes
Overwhelmingly, it is not the Zoom class, for all their virtue signaling about social justice. It is working people, it is truckers, moms, firefighters, and cops. When I spoke at a rally against forcing injections on first responders in NYC, the audience was made-up mostly of working people. The people who marched for every other cause, and NYC, my affluent liberal tribe sat that one out. It was the first responders who put their bodies in harm’s way for the safety of my colleagues and acquaintances. But when it came to it, when it came to protecting the bodies of first responders from coercion and harm, the Zoom class failed utterly to reciprocate with courage of their own.
Tyranny ends when enough ordinary people take a stand
I hope and trust that all people will rethink our remaining silences. In this moment when freedom itself is in the balance, when the alternative is servitude forever, this decision on whether to speak up makes all the difference. Tyrants only fall when there is mass resistance. History is clear on this. When it is just a few, well, they’re marginalized, silenced, smeared.
One of my favorite quotations is from the late poet Audre Lorde. “My silence had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”
A God-given opportunity to become more
This is a dangerous moment indeed, but it could also become a moment of profound blessing. It also gives each of us a God-given opportunity to serve our kind. In the process we become immeasurably more than we had been before. Maybe in the course of forcing ourselves to act bravely we actually do become brave. Someday, kids and grandkids will ask each of us directly, “Why did you stand by? Why did you not help me?” Or else, they will say, “Thank you so much for speaking for me when I was too little to speak.”
Contrary to the myth of the loner superhero of comic books, mustering the courage to stand against our woke world is found in the company of other liberty-minded people, the kind you’ll find at a MVLA event, or listening to our podcasts. Just as fear leads to isolation and bondage, so courage leads to community and liberty.
Let’s be brave together.
