Our Age of Cowardice By Kate Paul Dillon for Red State
Something sinister has beset Americans: a malignant disease, its origin now untraceable, contaminating nearly every aspect of our culture. We all experience it, we are all guilty of it. We have even come to accept it as a normal part of life. After a weekend of watching the horrific news out of Afghanistan, much of which disturbingly mirrored those images of 9/11 so many of us held quietly in the back of our minds for decades, the national scope and international devastation caused by this disease of ours was thrown squarely in our faces. With Biden’s speech yesterday afternoon, coming far too late and far too short after much hesitation and silence by the administration, many of us were unified in the visceral disgust and revulsion at the words we heard. The lack of accountability, the passing of blame on all parties except on the man holding what ought to be the greatest leadership position in the world, and the strenuous avoidance of any honest communication out of fear of accepting failure are the unsightly symptoms of this disease that none of us would want to ever behold. But now, here it is, and we can’t look away. We might have been able to ignore a culture afraid of failure, a culture of cowardice and cowards, but we can no longer ignore the consequences of doing so.
Have you ever been abandoned? Perhaps in small ways, those daily occurrences you pass off as normal acts of life, though they might twinge your self-esteem, you come to accept. A new romantic interest stops responding, the Uber driver who is supposed to pick you up cancels without notice or reason. Just part of life, caused by anything or nothing, leaving you with a tiny slice of limbo that is actually quite easy to live with. What about a bigger abandonment? The sudden silence of a life-long friend? Family and loved ones of years throwing you overboard with no explanation – or, worse, explanations that make no sense, leaving you with a broken and confused sense of reality? Have you had someone take everything from you, or leave you to have everything stolen, and then told you it was your fault? They don’t owe you an explanation and never did, while the promises they gave you and trust you had in them crumbled around you. If so, multiply this by thirty-one million. You might begin to comprehend what the abandonment of a whole nation must feel like.
