Bravery

I teach History when not up to my elbows in the guts of something interesting elsewhere on campus. It’s a subject that provides more heroes than most. Back through time there are great deeds, great men and women, great events that fill students and misty eyed teachers with a longing to have seen or to have been a part of them. But like most subjects we miss the point and the purpose of heroes. If we want to show students bravery and to give them examples of the people we should look to as our models for what is right there are people today who put themselves in harm’s way because they believe in what they are doing, or simply don’t have a fear of what the world may do or think.

For the past twenty years journalist Bob Fisk has reported from the Middle East, seeking the truth of the situation, running towards the confusion, asking the questions we all want answers to and producing endless thousands of words so that we may better comprehend the intricacies of the region. Regardless he continues to show the beauty of a region the lowest common denominator press have written off as a nest of horrors.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-if-only-hague-and-clinton--would-listen-to-yusuf-islam-7280059.html

Back in 2008 Christopher Hitchens. Journalist and enfant terrible of the literary world was brave enough to put himself in the hands of SERE trained special forces soldiers to show the world what was happening at Guantanamo bay and that Waterboarding was a horror that they needed to know about. The video of the event seems to humiliate him; but in reality he shows himself to be braver than most, allowing the world to see him weak so he can reveal a truth about ourselves.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808

Sometimes this pursuit of the story ends in tragedy. Foreign correspondent Marie Colvin died yesterday in Syria, in the middle of an event too complex and too terrifying for most she sought to show the truth of it and paid for that determination with her life. She will be missed and mourned.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17127722

All three are braver than most of the collected warlords and despots that fill my text books and demonstrate a way of thinking we should celebrate; putting the pursuit of truth above comfort, dignity, safety and even life.

These are our heroes for 2012.

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