Courage and it's lack

Robert Tracinski commenting on the reaction of the Liberal Beta males showing off their cowardice as if it were a badge of intellectual honor to admit that they are physical cowards.

Courage: The Mother of the Virtues

Consider The Daily Beast’s Mike Barnicle, who dismisses arguments that the passengers should have intervened, scolding us that, “The reality is that nobody knows how they would react in a similar situation. We’d like to think we’d behave honorably, with courage and care, but we simply cannot know until a moment like that occurs.” Really? Nobody could ever know how they would react? It’s as if it is a totally exotic notion that anyone would ever have been called upon to show physical courage at any point in their lives...

Courage is now viewed as exotic and unusual and unproven and unknowable—rather than a normal and expected part of being a man.

This is the part that got me:

Ironically, the same people now making excuses for cowardice are the kind who engage in exaggerated Kabuki theater displays about how evil slavery was and how terrible the Confederate flag is and how much they furiously oppose them—150 years after it took any courage to do so. But how do they think slavery was defeated? Who do they think took down that flag the first time around? By their own admission, they would have been the ones averting their eyes when they saw a master beating a slave. They would have been the ones to make compromises and concessions every time John Calhoun thundered...

And this:

Perhaps this explains the weird combination of intrusive moralizing about “microaggressions” on one side, and elaborate excuses for passivity on the other. The people cowering in the corners not wanting to make eye contact while a thug carves up some poor sucker are the same people who stay silent while a Twitter mob demands that some guy be fired from his job based on a dubious report of an allegedly offensive statement. They’re the people who tell you that they agree with the article you wrote but won’t post it to Facebook because they don’t want to deal with the anger they get from people who disagree. They are the ones who give the fashionable political or cultural stampede of the moment the dangerous confidence that it is backed by a total consensus, because they don’t want to be the ones to stick their necks out.

Courage is an essential virtue for a free society—and an insurmountable barrier to petty tyranny. Perhaps this explains why cowardice is being openly touted as a new virtue.