By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.

The most courageous person I know was involved in a collision with a kudu – a very large South African antelope – in the year 2000, when he was 21 years old. 'The kudu lost,' as he put it laconically when an orthopaedic surgeon inquired about the accident where he lay in the emergency ward of a hospital. He had been driving to a city 120 kilometres from where he lived, taking his girlfriend back to the university where she was a student, when the kudu scaled a low fence on the side of the road and landed on their car's windscreen. This was the equivalent of a bull, or a big cow, landing on a car's windscreen.

I visited him the day after he was admitted to the intensive care ward of a hospital in the city where he lived. To see this once healthy, strong, and active young man reduced to a person who has essentially lost the use of his body – someone who has become an 'I cannot,' instead of the 'I can' he was before, in the words of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty – was heart-wrenching. Particularly because he is my son. This was exacerbated by his wry rhetorical comment to me: 'What is worse than waking up from a nightmare? When you realise that you have awakened to the nightmare.'

Marco is now in his late forties, and despite his disability, has a good job and earns a decent salary. Most importantly – attesting to my observation, that he is the most courageous person I know – he never complains, has a sense of humour and likes going out with us, despite the difficulties involving moving into the car from his wheelchair and back again. He faces a difficult life with resolve and fortitude, and I never stop learning from him about the question concerning the meaning of one's life. As he put it to me once: 'Dad, I used to ask the obvious question, why this happened to me. Then, when reading Nietzsche, I realised that I am the only one who can answer that – by the way I live.'

Why have I related this story about my younger son and how an unpredictable event changed his life forever? Because there is an analogy to be drawn between the nightmare he awakened to, on the one hand, and waking to the nightmarish world we have inhabited since roughly 2020, on the other. Every day when I wake up, it dawns on me, once more, that this is the true nightmare, and one may add that, as in the case of Marco, the answer to the question, why it has happened to (or been inflicted upon) humanity, is one that only we ourselves can provide – through the manner in which we respond to it.

Filipe Rafaeli has given us a vivid account of the apathetic 'response' – if it could be called that – to the ongoing attempt to enslave humanity, by comparing the creative cultural 'answer' to the threat of nuclear catastrophe behind the Cold War by particularly young people – in the guise of life-affirming music, among other things – to the cowardly withdrawal from the possibility of totalitarian rule, today. Instead of finding creative ways to resist it, the majority of people at present resort to hiding in cyberspace, or not questioning questionable decisions by 'authorities,' for instance. Rafaeli is right to describe ours as a 'cowardly society.'

Just yesterday a friend of ours told me about someone throwing up his arms in the course of a conversation (which presumably involved what are still, incongruously, called 'conspiracy theories,' instead of 'conspiracy realism,' as it should be), and querulously wondering aloud why people are 'so distrustful.' That's a manifestation of cowardice, because acknowledging that the stench of a large rat hangs everywhere in the air would entail the need to adopt a stance to it: either acceptance or rejection, with their respective consequences for action.

Such a person would probably question my use of the term 'nightmare,' above. However, apart from the analogy in question, between a disabled person realising what a nightmare he has awakened to, and humanity having a similarly disco...