Courage and Convictions Would you actually risk your life for justice?

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http://inthesetimes.com/article/12864/courage_and_convictions


A photograph of John Cornford (1915-1936) sat on the mantle piece in my parents' house.

I suppose most of us live with some kind of anxiety that in a fire, a shipwreck, an earthquake or a battle, we’d save our skins, run for our lives and ignore the plight of everyone else. We jeer, surely uneasily, at J. Bruce Ismay, the owner of the Titanic, who leapt into a lifeboat when a thousand “gentlemen simply stood about the decks, smoking cigarettes, talking to one another and waiting for the hour to strike,” as Frances Wilin writes in How to Survive the Titanic. For Ismay, as for Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, what happened was a matter of chance – snatched at or tragically missed. Ismay spent the rest of his life explaining what had happened, to the world and to himself, managing his guilt, but eternally dishonored. Lord Jim’s jumping from a distressed ship to save himself deprives him decisively of the heroic life he’d hoped and imagined for himself, a shadowy dream that remains with him forever.

Captain Francesco Schettino, apparently responsible for running the Costa Concordia aground off the coast of Tuscany in January and for swiftly fleeing the scene, having, it is said, “slipped and fallen into a life boat,” is despised and vilified in Italy and elsewhere for his cowardice as well as his good looks and his perma-tan.

Some of my discomfort may be due to the “women and children first” aspect of it all, and to that other tradition, which has women in World War I brandishing the white feather in the face of pacifists and conscientious objectors.

I find it easy to imagine my own cowardice, fear and willingness to rely on women being let off the ship first and not reproached for doing so. What is much more difficult to imagine is the extraordinary bravery of, for instance, those young, barely trained and lightly armed Libyans facing up to a professional army and its tanks in Misrata. And the Egyptians, the young men and women in Tahrir Square, confronted by baton-wielding policemen and snipers.