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Bravery or dogged endurance?

By Brian Holden - posted Friday, 9 July 2010


In her last agonising days, a friend of a friend of mine refused all pain relief. She had been an outstandingly strong person since childhood and she was not going to weaken at the end. She must have been frightened of the misery ahead and the risk was that she would not stick to her plan - which would have added disgust with herself to the sad situation. Would you judge her to be a brave person?

I would judge her to be brave as what she did was calculated. On the other hand as she had no children to inspire, it seemed to be pointless. This example makes me realise that identifying bravery is not clear-cut.

To answer the question, “what place has bravery in modern society?”, we need to define what a brave act is. To my understanding it is the action of a person who:

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  • has carefully identified the objective, weighed up the risks, and, even though fearful;
  • has decided to take his or her chances; and
  • that action has to be of some advantage to others other than to that person’s self-image.

So, it came as a disappointment when I realised that our Victoria Crosses have probably been awarded for acts of momentary madness when rage caused all sense of danger to vanish. (I was first alerted to this probability by the movie They Came to Cordura.)

I don’t know what the risk of disease or violence is for those who work for Médecins Sans Frontièrs, but I suspect that this work also meets the above criteria and offers the opportunity to be quietly brave in modern society. I say “quietly brave” as the brave are not necessarily where the media is looking. The media needs a Jessica Watson.

Confusing dogged endurance with bravery

The coloured image I had of myself led me to agree to partner a very fit friend walking a route in Europe called the SR5. Our packs were so heavy that each time I put mine on I had to get it up onto a ledge and then back into it to get my shoulders under the straps.

I bore the pain and near-exhaustion rather than admit to making a mistake. But after putting one foot in front of the other for 700 kilometers, I gave up. My companion continued on to complete the 2,100 kilometers.

I felt a failure and my children’s only reaction was to declare that I was an old fool to attempt what I did (I was aged 55 at the time). That experience caused me to ponder the pointlessness of obsessive sports training when to be unplaced is to be ignored by the public.

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Solo sailor Jessica Watson took a gamble. If she did not attain her objective, the project would have been a sad memory. Not bravery but foolishness would have been the judgment of the media-molded minds of the public. If there was an expensive rescue, the public may have been angry. Fortunately, her gamble paid off.

Jessica says that she is not a hero. She is right. She simply thinks on a different level to the vast majority. She saw the voyage ahead of her as a job to be done. When she visualised her craft in a howling gale in the black of night, she did not break out into a cold sweat. Instead she visualised the equipment doing its job and she doing her job. She would never have sailed otherwise. Her parents are to be commended for being such realists. They knew their daughter. Their critics did not.

If there was a danger, then it was that Jessica would be knocked unconscious - and not able to manage the risk. This could have happened even if she took every precaution that it did not. Otherwise, with almost pinpoint GPS navigation, emergency beacons, daily radio contact, unsinkable floats equipped to keep a sailor alive for days until located by an air search - she was at very little risk.

Consider another circumnavigation of the world. Ferdinand Magellan’s ship was of a size a little bigger than the smallest Sydney ferry. He bid farewell to his family while knowing that there was a far less than an even chance that he would ever see them again (he didn’t).

Although he had little idea of the size of the planet and an instrument for determining longitude had still to be invented, he intended to just keep sailing west. After rounding the tip of South America the ocean seems to go on forever into the nothingness of the Pacific. His food and water were putrid, everybody was weak and in pain from scurvy and suppurating sores. The crew would have liked to kill him and turn the ship back - but the man just kept going.

If Jessica was only interested in being greeted by family and friends, the media gave her no choice in the matter. Our government also seemed to have needed a hero, because included in the spectacular welcome Sydney gave Jessica and her pink boat, was about 200 square meters of publicly funded pink carpet.

Our uncomfortable awareness of our own failings can be worked up by external forces into paying homage to the success of a substitute for ourselves. Television coverage of the flotilla of boats escorting Jessica to the landing or the crowd dynamics felt by 10,000 people waiting at the Opera House created an oceanic feeling that all could share in. It was enough to put a tear in the eye of many who had never met her.

Conclusion

But where can we look for those who really dare? What about rock climbing? It may frighten you to even think about it - but the most dangerous part of a rock climber’s day is in driving to and from the site: the driving competence of others on the road cannot be managed by the climber.

The 21st century has few, if any, opportunities to be brave in the romantic sense. The heroic age of polar explorations ended in 1915. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh was only in danger for the 36 hours he was over the Atlantic (although it was mortal danger as all who had gone before had died in the attempt).

What was most admirable about the 16-year old sailor was her mental toughness in withstanding her solitary confinement for months. Many teenagers claimed that they were inspired by her to rise to a challenge - but very few would have the mind of someone like Jessica Watson.

Technology, and increasingly methodical training, is steadily bringing the risk of “risky” activities down to the level of the risk each of us takes walking home at night from a railway station. Today those who desire to have heroes in a world where risk has been managed almost out of existence are mostly mislabeling extraordinary endurance as an act of bravery.

But there are the heroes who are there to be appreciated if we make the effort to look their way. One example is the two middle-aged Australian Vietnam War veterans who volunteered to clear Cambodia of land mines which threaten to blow children’s feet off. To my knowledge they are still there and hoping that their luck holds out and they don’t lose any body parts.

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About the Author

Brian Holden has been retired since 1988. He advises that if you can keep physically and mentally active, retirement can be the best time of your life.

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