I got shot at once.
It wasn't personal. I was standing behind an unmarked police car talking with a couple of plainclothes detectives when a coke dealer walked out of his motel room and loosed a round in our general direction because he was paranoid. Which he should have been, because in the room next to his a nest of undercover narcotics agents--members of one of those inter-departmental drug task forces that were all the rage in the '80s--were listening to and recording his conversations.
A moment or two after he pulled that trigger, those agents somehow took the shooter into custody without firing a shot of their own. I imagine this took great discipline on their part, but I don't know exactly how it was accomplished because I was face down in a ditch beside the trained professionals.
I had nothing to think about or decide. I'm not even sure my brain registered the weapon in his hand before my body threw itself on the ground. There was no time to be afraid. But both of the detectives I was with had time to assess the situation and draw their own weapons before hitting the dirt.
I think about that moment whenever someone talks about what they would do in some hypothetical situation where they're facing the prospect of great bodily harm or death. I think mostly about how there was no act of volition on my part. Something took hold of me.
There are ways to defeat this instinct for self-preservation. People can be trained to resist the impulse to remove themselves from potential dangers. People do brave things every day, and some do brave things routinely. Not because they're not afraid, but because they've learned how to overrule their instincts.
Most of us are lucky to never find out what we would do in a life-or-death situation. Most of us would probably not cover ourselves with glory, no matter how many movies we've seen where our surrogate kills all the bad guys. Most of us are pretty ordinary in most respects, which is one more reason to appreciate excellence and honor expertise.
We don't know what our president would do if he was outside a school during an active shooting incident with only his tweeter in his hand. Maybe he would have run in to try to stop the shooter. Some people definitely would have done that.
But is there any correlation between the people who loudly claim bravery and those who actually are? The quiet people are the ones you have to watch; those given to dramatically declaring their courage might be trying to convince themselves of something.
It's an easy thing to say. And given the way we've all grown up with simulated gun battles on our screens, maybe not a hard thing to believe. We've all been the hero in our dreams. We've all stormed the beaches of Normandy in our imaginations.
On the other hand, real people did storm the beaches at Normandy. Real people did die in the sand. And it wasn't easy or glorious for them. So maybe we should respect that.
Surely some of them panicked and broke discipline. The fear is strong in many of us. Some cannot imagine anything dearer than their next breath.
But most of of them didn't. Most of them did what they considered their duty, and the reasons they did seem immaterial. It was something they did because they had to, because they couldn't imagine themselves not doing it. Whether they acted out of fear of shame or from peer pressure doesn't really matter. They acted honorably.
Plenty of people do, but any news cycle provides far more examples of cowardice, even when the stakes are reducible to things so minor as dollars and votes. You are what you do. Not what you claim.
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Editorial on 03/04/2018