Courage Against the Current

The world is complex. Life is complex. There are many demands upon us all, and we find ourselves needing to know more and more about much more, with less to knowing all we need to know. With so many pressures and problems we are sometimes tempted to take the line of least resistance and hesitate to move contrary to the current.

Yet we have a real responsibility for our choices, our opinions, our principles—and we cannot safely assume that all things are as they should be. We cannot rightly excuse ourselves from responsibility of seeing for ourselves where any trend or tendency, any drift or direction, is likely to take us. With freedom there is need for honest individualism, of frank thinking, of constructive suggestions. We have to have the courage to voice our honest views.

We should not be opposed to things because of stubbornness or pride, prejudice or perversity, neither should we assume that all is well without inquiring for ourselves. Where there is too much timidity, principles suffer, and so do people, and so does self-respect. We cannot safely isolate ourselves from issues. Nor should young people be content unthinkingly to follow the crowd. What “everyone is doing” is often a fleeting phase, a passing style that someone started. The crowd has no higher wisdom; it is made up by individuals, every one of whom should pause to consider, to think things through.

Criticism to opposition should never be petty, unreasoning or irresponsible. But we must have the courage to criticize constructively—to think, to speak, to be counted when occasion requires—to make our moral and honest individual force felt and never simply drift downstream with silent, unreasoning consent.

“What a new face courage puts on everything!” said Emerson. To which another added, “Nothing but the right can ever be expedient.”