It was tempting to open with a passage from Volodimir Zelensky’s memorable address to Congress. But that is everywhere today. Instead, here’s a bit from a tribute by columnist David Ignatius:

Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, likes to quote a comment attributed to Napoleon: “In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” Zelensky is the embodiment of that everlasting truth.”
Quoted by David Ignatius, Washington Post, 12/21/2022:

‘Tis the season for wrapup-of-the-year pieces. In his.“Farewell to a strange year,” columnist George Will pads the paragraphs mostly with predictably reactionary twaddle. But one item tung a bell for me. If momentary alignment with him here unmasks me as a neo-reactionary, so be it:

Will: “The strangeness of 2022 was exemplified by the extravagant investment of time, brain cells and media passion in fretting about Twitter.

This medium, which humanity progressed without for 10 millennia [only ten, George?], suddenly seemed to some worrywarts as vital as oxygen and proteins, and as perishable as the planet.

Progressives, constantly hungering for cataclysms (“Democracy is dying!” “Earth is boiling!”), worried that an end of politically motivated, government-influenced curating of content on Twitter, which is a 16-year-old adolescent, might doom this 246-year-old nation.

Only 23 percent of Americans, disproportionately progressives, use Twitter, and 25 percent of the 23 percent generate 97 percent of the tweets. . . .

Turning to actual threats to the Republic (which Will would likely pooh-pooh), Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has cemented heroic status in my eyes with his unrelenting exposures of the extremist oligarchic capture of the Supreme Court. Here’s a barb from his book detailing it, The Scheme:

[Judicial] “Originalism” started as the notion that courts had strayed from the original text and meaning of the Constitution and should return to a mythical “original” interpretation.
— But originally, voting was limited to people who were white, male, and owned property.
— Originally, Black slaves were quantified as “three-fifths” of a person.
— Originally, women had virtually no economic role or property rights.
— Originally, Blacks and whites could not marry, and gays could be prosecuted and imprisoned.
— And originally, an agrarian society needed little consumer protection; without massive industries, it needed no protections from abuse by massive industries.
For an arch-conservative, you can see the charm of “originalism.” But most normal people don’t think that what everyone needs is a bit more 1788 in their lives.

And—

Because of the ugly effects of Court decisions, wealthy interests are closer than they have been in a century to a quiet capture of our democracy, accomplished through anonymous dark money and through front groups with “fictitious names.” The Framers of the Constitution must be rolling in their graves.

For help in keeping on, I recall the words of religious thinker/author Karen Armstrong, from a New York Times interview:

NYT: Are there religious historians or scholars you especially admire?

Karen Armstrong: “My understanding of religion was transformed nearly 30 years ago by the great Muslim scholar and mystic Ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240). Sadly, he is little known in the West. A truly religious person, he insisted in ‘Fusus al-Hikam,’ [that he] was equally at home in a synagogue, temple, church or mosque, since no faith has the monopoly of truth:

‘Do not praise your own faith so exclusively that you disbelieve all the rest. If you do this, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, cannot be confined to any one creed, for he says, “Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah.”(Quran 2:115).
Everybody praises what he believes; his god is his own creature and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.’

I immediately copied this extract and pinned it onto the bulletin board beside my desk. It has remained absolutely essential to my work.”

Looking, back, as part of looking ahead, the last word here goes to Isabel Wilkerson, from her 2020 book Caste:

The [documentary] film played in a loop on the [Berlin museum] wall without comment. None was necessary. I sat mesmerized and repulsed, sickened but unable to get up. Perhaps if I stayed long enough, I might begin to comprehend it.

In that moment, you are face-to-face with the force of willing susceptibility to evil. The Nazis could not have risen to power and done what they did without the support of the masses of people who were open to his spell. I could not stop watching it.

The smiling, shining faces in this carpet of exuberant humanity—this massive number of people could not all be what we would consider evil. They are husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, children, uncles, nephews, all gathered at a ticker-tape parade on a brilliant, sunny day celebrating what we know to be a horror.

I thought to myself, Did the German people know the carnage they were celebrating? Yes, it turns out, clips of bombing raids were shown during news reels before the feature film at the cinema. They knew that the French had been violently defeated. It was two years past Kristallnacht. They knew that Jewish friends and neighbors had been rounded up, publicly humiliated, taken away, never seen again. And the people in the crowd were smiling and happy.

Everything that happened to the Jews of Europe, to African-Americans during the lynching terrors of Jim Crow, to Native Americans as their land was plundered and their numbers decimated, to Dalits considered so low that their very shadow polluted those deemed above them—happened because a big enough majority had been persuaded and had been open to being persuaded, centuries ago or in the recent past, that these groups were ordained by God as beneath them, subhuman, deserving of their fate.

Those gathered on that day in Berlin were neither good nor bad. They were human, insecure and susceptible to the propaganda that gave them an identity to believe in, to feel chosen and important.

What would any of us have done had we been in their places? How many people actually go up against so great a tide of seeming inevitability? How many can see the evil for what it is, as it is occurring? Who has the courage to stand up to the multitudes in the face of a charismatic demigod who makes you feel better about yourself, part of something bigger than yourself, that you have been primed to believe?

Every last one of us would now say to ourselves, I would never have attended such an event, I would never have attended a lynching. I would never have stood by, much less cheered, as a fellow human was dismembered and then set on fire here in America.

And yet tens of thousands of everyday humans did just that in the lifetime of the oldest among us in Germany, in India, in the American South. This level of cold-hearted disconnection did not happen overnight. It built up over generations of insecurities and resentments. . . . 

It is harder to focus on the danger of common will, the weaknesses of the human immune system, the ease with which the toxins can infect succeeding generations. Because it means the enemy, the threat, is not one man, it is us, all of us, lurking in humanity itself.