Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about courage. Mostly political courage. I think that courage is the externalization of character. Yeah, character is also about doing the right thing even when no one is looking, but it seems to me that doing the right thing when everyone is looking, but not everyone sees what you do. Not your friends or family or business associates. Somewhere between 45 and 50 years old, most people stop caring what others think about them. That increases, I think, with age. Does that begin to account for our polarization? And given our polarization, how do we explain the openness and acceptance of difference among the teens to thirty-somethings? And does that account for the fact that a significant portion of our youngest generation identifiesin some gender-fluid way? It takes courage to be yourself when there is so much pressure to conform. Character is the externalization of who you are and the measure of those who would judge you for it.
