Without courage to take action, day will come when it’s too late

By David McElroy · November 4, 2020

A friend sent me an unexpected note last week. He had observed me having a confrontation with a bully — and he had something to say about it.

“I wish I had your courage,” my friend’s note started. “I have wanted to tell [Bully] to ‘go to hell’ on more than one occasion, but I haven’t.”

This surprised me. I certainly hadn’t seen it as courage on my part. It just seemed like the obviously right thing to do. The bully was trying to be intimidating to me and to others — about something he knew nothing about — and I called him out on his behavior. I calmly pointed out his factual errors. When he doubled down on arrogance and bluster, I pointed out what he was doing and then moved on without allowing it to escalate.

As I’ve thought about my friend’s comment since then, it’s occurred to me that courage can be very different for different people. When I’m standing up for what I believe is right — or for people who I believe are being bullied or oppressed — it seems natural to speak up if I think I can help.

About other things, though, I’ve sometimes been a coward.

We face different sorts of decision points in our lives. At some of those, the facts are clear and we know what we have to do — in that moment. I have tended to be pretty good at those, at least in the ones when I thought I could make a difference.

When I was about 14 years old, a bully was picking, both verbally and physically, on my younger sister at the city swimming pool. He was several years older than I was — a high school football player — and he was a really big guy. But my sister was getting scared, so I stepped between them and told him to leave her alone.

I was terrified. I was certain that I was about to get beaten up, because I would have no chance against him. But I had to do the right thing. It wasn’t even a choice for me. I just acted. And then a strange thing happened. The bully backed down. He blustered and he said a few ugly things. But he backed away — and never said another word to either one of us again.

There’s another kind of decision point that isn’t so clear for me, though. And those are the ones when I’ve shown myself to be cowardly.

Through my life, I have constantly faced points at which I needed to make changes in my life. They’ve been points when it was obvious that something was wrong — in a relationship, in a business situation, in a job or even in friendships — and it’s been obvious what I should do.

But I’ve avoided taking those obvious steps. I’ve been the master of telling myself that I’ll wait. I’ll deal with it later. I’ll see if something will change. I’ve made up every excuse — at times — to avoid doing things I needed to do, because I fooled myself into thinking I could wait. I could always make the change next week, next month, maybe next year.

And you probably do the same thing in some way.

We keep putting things off because we know we would have to pay a price to fix things. We keep acting as though we can avoid paying the price, that things aren’t bad enough yet. We lie to ourselves that things will get better, because that’s easier than taking the acton that’s required to make change now.

We tell ourselves we have plenty of time. I’ve been the master of that lie.

I was 30 when I realized that I was an artist who needed to make films. In all the time since then, I’ve made exactly one short film. I’ve been telling myself that I had plenty of time to do it. The time wasn’t right yet.

You might be 25 when you realize you need to make a change, but you have plenty of time, so you can put off the decision. Then you’re 30, then 35. You still have plenty of time to change things. You’re not happy. The same horrible feeling nags at you when you can allow yourself to feel the truth.

Then you wake up one day and you’re 40.

You’ve wasted years. Then you’re 45. Before you know it, you’ve wasted decades on a life that seems almost meaningless to you — all because you didn’t have the courage to deal with things when you knew you should.

It could be your job. You know you need to leave, but it’s easier to keep putting up with what’s making you unhappy. Or it could be a relationship. It’s not bad enough for you to pay the price you’ll have to pay today to fix it. So you tolerate unhappiness or mediocrity or even abuse — because you can always decide later. You have plenty of time.

And then when things inevitably get even worse — and when they finally reach the worst and you have to do something right now — it’s too late to take the option you could have taken earlier.

Doors have closed. Offers that you felt flattered to receive, but that you didn’t take, are no longer there. Your options are now limited. And you’re really stuck, all because you didn’t have the courage to do what needed to be done — when you had choices. When you could make change on your own terms instead of in a panic.

I’ve not had the courage to make the choices I needed to make because I was waiting for everything to be perfect. I’ve looked for a solution that would not require me to pay any price. I understand now that there’s not one. There never has been one and there never will be. But I let chances pass that I regret not grabbing when I could.

Worst of all, I wasted time. I let years pass by me while I waited for a time when I could make a change that didn’t require courage.

Marketing guru Seth Godin encourages people to have the courage to do things for which they’re not ready. He suggests they do something badly until they get it right.

“If you wait until you are ready, it is almost certainly too late,” Godin wrote.

The best time for me to have become a filmmaker was when I was 30. The idea was ludicrous at the time, so I waited. The best time to have married someone who loved me was when a woman badly wanted me, but I thought I had plenty of time to decide, so I waited and lost the chance. The best time for me to have done a lot of things was 10 years or 20 years ago or even 30 years ago.

But the second best time is right now.

I don’t know whether I really have courage or not. When I’ve had to react — and I haven’t given myself any choice — it’s been easy. When I’ve left myself with a way to delay and avoid paying an immediate price, I’ve been a coward.

There are things I need to have the courage to do right now. If I keep waiting — if I keep being a coward — the day will come when it’s really too late for me. And I don’t want to live with that kind of regret if I can avoid it.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts