I am exasperated by those who stay in the shadows, agreeing with the risktaking of others, who talk about their “courage.” I feel that this is a form of othering that dehumanizes and exploits those speaking out.
It casts the people who do take risks for the wellbeing of others, as being somehow naturally better-fitted for this difficult job than is the speaker. It’s a form of offloading one’s own responsibility guiltlessly onto a subgroup which is assigned the status of somehow liking the battle, or somehow fitted better for combat, by nature, than is the speaker himself.
It’s like all those guys I knew in college who never did the dishes after dinner, because they said they were really bad at it.
I don’t know anyone truly heroic who likes the current battle. But I think that most could not live with themselves if they walked away from doing what they know they can do to help — in a moment in which obvious right and wrong have not been clearer since 1941.
Dr Patrick Phillips — a Canadian ER doctor who spoke out early against the harms of “lockdowns,” when many fellow doctors were silent — said something like, “I realized that many of my peers were silent because they were worried about their careers. But I also realized that if I didn‘t speak out, soon I would have no career worth saving.” And Dr Jay Bhattacharya said, last night on Fox, when he was asked about the Great Barrington signatories having been vilified, smeared, attacked and hounded professionally for 18 months — for having been right about the harms of “lockdowns” — something like: “If I did not speak out, what was the point of my career in public health?”