Once, when I told my dad that the schoolyard terror, Brick Bratton, pushed me down in front of a bunch of giggling girls, he said, “Bullies are bullies as long as they’re allowed to be. What did you do?”
“He said if I got up he’d knock me down again.”
“So you just lay there … exactly what he wanted. You are a sissy, and he knows it.” The disappointment in his eyes hurt me more than his belt would have.
In time, I realized that Dad’s unflinching courage, his insistence on standing up to threats, and being known as someone who always stands up to them, is the only way to survive in a world with no small population of bullies.
My dad, an uneducated farmer, probably didn’t know what the word deterrence meant, but it was the code he lived by. If he knew what appeasement and unilateral concession meant, he most certainly scorned them as cowardly, and in his mind, cowards aren’t worth the price of bullets needed to send their yellow souls to hell.
My favorite contemporary American, Ronald Reagan, lived by a similar code, and demonstrated it when responding to a question about his stance on the Cold War: “We win; they lose.”
The bully Russians, threatening to overrun small, Western European countries, clearly understood that this man’s words were truculent truth, not pusillanimous posturing or bully brinksmanship. Reagan’s nuclear deterrent threat crumbled the Soviet Empire.
The current administration has adopted a stance different from Reagan’s, and of other previous administrations— a stance so naïve that Americans cognizant of their country’s perilous global situation must question their leaders’ apparent confidence that the likes of Iran’s megalomaniac president — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies that the Holocaust ever happened and vows to annihilate Israel — would never consider launching weapons of mass destruction toward America.
If asked how they can accept such a blatant untruth, I fear that many who hold this nation’s very existence in their hands would provide a Neville Chamberlain Outstanding Appeasement Award answer: “Because they promised they wouldn’t.”
A terrifying nightmare for patriotic Americans — who, like me, dream of a bright, productive, secure, free future for their children and grandchildren — is a someday scenario in which their offspring would be seared to cinders in a nuclear attack, or reduced to groveling in their death throes after a nerve gas bombardment.
That scary someday scenario seems to have become a little less hypothetical.
Not long ago, Defense Secretary Bob Gates, no doubt speaking against his own will but for his commander-in-chief’s, announced administrative changes involving response to attacks on the American homeland.
He explained that, following a biological or chemical weapons attack, if the hostile nation is “… in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty … the U. S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it.”
For bullies like Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, and Kim Jong-il, there could have been no sweeter message.
An obvious question arises: On whose side is our side?
Jimmy Reed is an Oxford, Mississippi resident, Ole Miss and Delta State University alumnus, Vietnam Era Army Veteran, former Mississippi Delta cotton farmer and ginner, author, and retired college teacher.
This story is a selection from Jimmy Reed’s latest book, entitled The Jaybird Tales.
Copies, including personalized autographs, can be reserved by notifying the author via email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
