HISTORY IN THE MAKING

I’ve never really been a brave person. At least not in the sense that most people mean. Perhaps I am lucky enough never to have had to be. I’ve seldom taken a risk, even if it was for my own benefit. Perhaps I’ve never believed enough in myself to do so. I always managed to avoid catching the eye, or placing the bet or “going for it” in a way that those who crave or desire, seek or achieve their own personal definition of greatness do. I scuttle about and muddle through, always fearing the worst, and hoping that the best will still happen despite the little I have to do with it. Taking a gamble, taking a risk, putting my life on the line. These are all things I have manifestly avoided as I’ve pottered along in my own little world and, somehow, I’ve got by.

I remember very clearly the day when the “Herald of Free Enterprise” sank, but not for the reasons you might think. This was, as you’ll be aware, a most terrible tragedy that led to much loss of life, and equally, so many small acts of bravery that meant that there wasn’t much, much more, but somehow, all those details are not what stay with me. What I remember is a very personal feeling of self-awareness and self-doubt. Apart from the fear, and the worry and the overwhelming sense of sadness for the victims and their families, I found myself wondering what I would have done in similar circumstances, and I came to the rather odd (and surprising) conclusion that I probably wouldn’t have believed it was real, that whatever was going on wasn’t actually happening because that sort of thing always happens somewhere else.

I don’t think that it has much to do with the fact that I’d only recently been on one of those vessels myself, either. Many of us can somehow personalise these events with the slight ridiculousness of “I was only there last week” or “I flew to the same place only three years ago” which personalise the danger to your audience but never really increase the danger to ourselves.

So what if you were in Dealey Plaza in 1988? There was no real danger of you catching a sniper’s bullet twenty-five years after the fact, was there? Or... So there you were, on a completely different airliner, in a completely different year, going to a place where nothing had yet happened. Ten years after the events of September 11th 2001, I still get a slight chill when I think about passing through Boston airport, despite the fact that it’s probably one of the safest airports to fly through in the world nowadays, and I only passed through it myself twice, five and six years after that awful day, but didn’t I feel brave (or scared) for doing so?

True bravery of course was what happened on the day itself, when history was yet to unfold, without the benefit of hindsight. That’s where the really brave people show themselves. When a fireman runs inside the place where everyone else is running away from. When the situation on your flight is so hopeless, but you decide to do something about it anyway, no matter how futile it might seem to be, or the lifeboatman risking the cruelest of seas after witnessing the devastation they’ve already seen. I heard recently that a true hero is someone who’s too scared to run away, but I think that might be nonsense. Or more likely it is typical self-deprecation of someone so brave that they’d rather not talk about it. So much of our media nowadays label the ordinary and the mundane as being heroic that the true meaning of the word seems somehow diminished by its prevalence.

Real bravery, to me, comes from those who are making the history that we don’t yet know. Those who remained stoking the boilers as the Titanic sank in the middle of a freezing ocean without a hope of rescue, or those who sat atop a 365 foot rocket and blasted off towards the moon without the benefit that we have of knowing that it’s going to be alright. It’s easy to say think that you’d be brave enough to do it yourself when all the data is in, it’s another thing entirely to be the first to try it, and simply not know the outcome.

“I know what I’d’ve done” is the mantra of one who is simply unaware of themselves. Yeah, like the rest of us you’d’ve been quaking with fear and hoping nobody picked you out. I hear it often about the soldiers of the First World War. “Well” says the cocksure young lad, safely blasting the zombies to kingdom come on his PlayStation “I’d’ve refused to go…” simply not understanding the historical context of the world as it was. We have the benefit of experience. We know, as far as we ever can, what was actually going on and can make rational decisions based on that which are ultimately pointless and futile because no one is actually asking us to go, not unless we’ve slipped into “The Twilight Zone” anyway…

One for all the teenagers there…

But the world as it was then was a very different place and not necessarily a better one. Social pressure and circumstances sent all those men to the trenches, and to not go was never an option for the thousands doomed to serve there. People do sometimes ask whether these later generations, those of us never asked to do such things would have been brave enough to do the same if asked, but it’s a moot point really. The world is different, people are different, understanding is different, communication is different, distribution of information is different.

That’s the thing about history, you already know how it’s going to turn out, but when you see events unfolding like they currently are in Tripoli, you really don’t know. It’s a brave person who will stand up and be counted when nobody yet knows who’s actually going to be doing the counting and what the outcome might be. Finding out which of us is prepared to stand up and take a stand when the wind could still blow in any direction and the dice could fall in any combination is a true sign of bravery. Those who are so bravely making their stand right now might be targeted if things don’t turn out the way they hope they will, and good people might yet suffer for simply having a point of view that differs from the one that gets final approval.