Heros and Civilization

Kate at Small Dead Animals has posted an extraordinary piece of writing. I will only excerpt it here and you should read the whole thing. I’ll provide the link at the bottom of this post.

It is a terrifyingly real, plainly truthful and starkly beautiful account by a friend of Kate’s who was in the first wave of emergency personnel to arrive at the the scene of the Fort Hood Jihad. Here is the piece of it that hit me the hardest:

A young man walked up to me and asked if I could help him, I asked him, "where are you shot?", he told me in the chest...I directed him to go sit in my ambulance and an army medic sat with him and started oxygen and bandaging on him; in the mist of the madness I was trying to determine who would be the first to be transported still waiting on the helicopters to land so I could fly out the worst.

While getting more bandaging material off my ambulance several bystanders carried a soldier to my truck that had been shot in the head, he was conscious and breathing, he kept asking me "am I gonna die?", I told him I was doing the best I could, knowing from experience his situation appeared bleak.

Behind my ambulance several bystanders were doing CPR on a lady that had obviously been fatally shot, in a mas-cal situation you do "the most good for the most people"...that means save the ones you can and black tag the un-salvageable...it's a harsh truth but effective in this type of situation.

Amidst the horror spawned by Jihad, Kate’s friend was able to use her training, rely on her experience, maintain her presence of mind and contain her emotional response in order to play her part in the miracle of Western Civilization.

Her cool-headedness and bravery (along, of course, with that of Officer Munley and all of the bystanders whom she also praises) is the very kind of expression of the Western style of thought and values in action that has brought us to the pinnacle of human achievement. It is not the phony "selflessness" of the progressive left. It is a world removed from the human cog-in-the-machine of communism. And it is from an entirely different universe from the self-surrendered slave of Allah whom she so pointedly refers to as “the shooter”.

If the woman who wrote this account seems like a normal, everyday person to you, it is because we share with her the prototypical Western values of human life, empirical utility and intellectual honesty that she unselfconsciously embodies. If she seems like a heroine, it is because she is.

If only our leaders could summon the courage, intelligence and common sense to meet the threats of creeping socialism and the aggressively expanding Caliphate with such a cool head and clear vision.

Read the whole thing!