I’ve been reading Steven Pressfield’s musings on warriors and warfare and this quote struck me like Ike Turner punching Tina when she fell flat while singing, “Rolling On The River”. Check it out.
“The Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy but where are they.” – Plutarch, Sayings Of The Spartans
And that, my friend, is one of the big differences between a warrior and a wuss.
A wuss, you see, looks for an excuse to run (I/we don’t have “enough”), but a warrior looks for the opportunity to throttle the enemy.
The strange thing is that, nowadays, in our aggravated state of wussification, one would call the inquirer of how many foes are arrayed against them “a wise calculator of the risks involved” and whether or not they are able to contend with what they have at hand or if they should retreat. When, in reality, such questions, often times, are nothing but cowardice masked in some shrewd sounding horse-crap that doesn’t make one sound like a scared quail.
That mindset afflicted an old friend of mine from Cali who was way smarter than I when it came to books and business, but who would always talk himself out of start-ups and personal goals because he always viewed how “insurmountable the obstacles were” rather than how he could possibly tackle his mountains. This attitude equated this brilliant, book-smart buddy’s being a stay-at-home dad versus an alpha-male butt-kicker.
How sad.
Politically speaking, I wish those who “represent us on the Right” would take this warrior mindset to heart versus rolling up in the fetal position and wetting their massive Republican diaper once they’re faced with the teeth of the liberal beast. The Left zealously sports this “die or be killed” attitude as they approach our culture wars, whereas those on the Right are mostly/merely butt-smoochin’ wind-testers, more vexed about whether or not they can keep their condo in D.C., their smidgen of faux power and their mistress, versus upholding our constitutional principles which have made us, heretofore, the most stonkin’ nation known to mankind.
From an ecclesiastical standpoint, don’t even get me started on how this lame spirit has taken possession of the brethren’s craven soul. To say that the church has become a toothless lion to cultural corruption would be akin to saying Hillary Clinton sort of lies. Fortuitous, we are not. Unlike Jesus, most pastors would rather fly than fight; and I hold them primarily responsible for the coarsening of our culture because I believe the state of our nation is due largely, in part, to the “holy nation” within unwilling to make principled stands when holy writ and common sense demand a throw down.
Here’s the bottom line, folks: if anything is worth doing it will be fraught with sick hurdles. That’s life, Dinky. The sooner we take on the warrior mentality, the quicker we’ll be talking about great victories. So, from now on, talk yourself into the battle instead of how you can get out of the battle.
