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Morals: Moral Courage
All my life, I have laughed in the wrong places.
In my latest book, "Why Johnny Can't Think: America's Professor-Priesthood," I talk about the time a professor read out the Preamble to Soviet Constitution and I laughed out loud.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
They may have been right.
This Preamble says, "The Soviet Union is a nation of peasants, workers, soldiers and intellectuals."
When you have to explain a joke it ruins it. But here is the kind of thing that hit me:
Let's say some ten-year-olds are deciding to set up a country. One kid says, "Tommy, you be the peasant. You'll be out in the mud all day and raise our food. Billy, you're be the worker. You'll be in the factory all day. Jimmy, you're be the soldier. You'll got out and get your leg blown off defending us."
Since Tommy and Billy and Jimmy are not college students in class, they will ask a question:
"While we are out slogging in the fields and factories and dying in the war, what are you going to be doing?"
The kid who set up the game replies, "I'll be the Intellectual. I'll sit around and tell you what to do."
Oh, come on, man, nobody would fall for that crap! It's laughable.
But I was the only one who laughed. About a hundred million people died under Communism because nobody laughed then, either.
If someone had had the brains to see how ridiculous this was and moral courage to laugh, the agony of hundreds of millions of people could have been spared. You could once have beaten this nonsense with ridicule.
But nobody laughed.
A thousand war heroes mean nothing compared to one person who has the brains and the moral courage to say the right thing at the right time.
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