BY JONATHAN TOBIAS

Eighty-one years ago, on June 6th, 160,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy on the north coast of France. It was the largest seaborne invasion in the history of mankind.

It was called D-Day – a military term used to designate the day on which a combat operation was to be initiated. The US Army says that some people think it stands for “Day of Decision.” And indeed, it was exactly that.

All those tens of thousands of soldiers made a decision that day in the teeth of fear. In the terrifying photo above, rightly entitled “Into the Jaws of Death,” you can see young men from the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division wading ashore under heavy fire from the open beach doors of the landing craft.

They had made a decision, and that decision was courage.

Courage, as my WWII vet and Ex-POW father-in-law was wont to tell me, was not a lack of fear. He laughed, with no little derision, at T-shirts emblazoned with “No Fear!” in punk rock letters. He said, “I went through a lot of fear,” when he went up in his B-17 over his bombing runs over the fascist Third Reich. “So did every kid who had to jump out of the Higgins Boats into the cold water,” he’d shake his head in awe at this point, “under Nazi machine gun fire.”

I force myself to watch “Saving Private Ryan” every year on June 6th. I’ve been told by a number of veterans that its depiction of the D-Day landing is about the most realistic one that’s been portrayed on the movie screen. It isn’t entertaining. At all. But it’s necessary. You have to make yourself experience – at least from this safe distance – at least a little bit of the soul-crushing horror of the Higgins door crashing down into the surf and the jackhammer barrage of lead from the sand cliffs at the top of your blurred horizon.

No fear? No way. You wouldn’t be human if you had no fear.

Aristotle was pretty clear about the fact that courage is not the opposite of fear. Courage, he said, is the decision to act for a good cause in the face of danger – despite the fear, not in the absence of it:

“The courageous man withstands and fears those things which it is necessary [to fear and withstand] and on account of the right reason, and how and when it is necessary [to fear or withstand] them, and likewise in the case of being bold.”

This is from his magisterial Nicomachean Ethics. Legend has it that he wrote it for his son Nicomachus, trying his best to train up his boy in the ways of goodness and truth so that he would not depart from it. I don’t know if that worked out or not, but Aristotle was adamant that courage was the prerequisite for the three other “Cardinal Virtues” (along with courage are prudence, justice, and temperance). In classical philosophy, all four of these virtues were necessary for the individual and society to “live the good life,” or to achieve “eudaimonia,” or “human flourishing.”

But Aristotle said that you have to have courage in order to be prudent (i.e., to make good, wise decision), to be just (i.e., to ensure that everyone receives what is due to them and that the law is applied fairly and equally), and to be temperate (i.e., to be moderate, to have self-control and to balance desires and impulses). These are what we call the “classical virtues,” which were added onto later by the Christian church with the “theological virtues” of faith, hope, and love.

Do you remember Neville Longbottom in the first Harry Potter book, “The Sorcerer’s Stone”? He disagreed with his friends’ plans adamantly and tried to stop them from sneaking out of the Gryffindor common room. At the end of the book, when everything was being sorted out, the headmaster Dumblemore made an astute statement about courage that is right for our time: “It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”

America needs a good helping of courage these days. There is way too much “seeing which way the wind goes” and “just going along with the crowd.” When I vote for a political candidate, the first thing I look for, besides decency, is courage – courage enough to take a stand even at the risk of being primaried. We need to take a courageous and civil stand for the American tradition established in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We need to bravely stand for liberty, equality, self-government and individual rights, the foundational principles of this country. We have a proud tradition of liberal democracy established, with a lot of providential help, by our Founding Fathers.

It is all too easy to notice the lack of courage – that is, what courage is not. Courage is not taking revenge or retribution. Courage is not wearing a gorilla mask and full combat body armor and shouldering an automatic gun in front of a Mexican restaurant. Courage is not ginning up a mob and shunting their anxiety toward scapegoats of the poor and powerless. Courage is not speech that is riddled with self-reference and self-aggrandizement. Courage is not hiding away in conspiracy theory and the dark precincts of intelligence networks. Courage is not speech that is riddled with self-reference and self-aggrandizement. And, it must be said, courage is certainly not Project 2025 or the imposition of authoritarianism onto democratic America.

Courage is not gaining the whole world and all the while losing one’s soul. Courage is and has always been bearing one’s cross of self-denial and self-donation.

And in the face of all of this opposition to courage, it’s too easy these days to lose one’s nerve, especially if you feel outnumbered, especially when there are indeed too many who would rather replace liberal democracy with something more expedient, something more authoritarian. Aristotle’s elder friend and teacher, the great philosopher Plato, once observed that “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

Maybe we can get that good old American courage back by remembering what all those boys went through when they made that fearful decision on D-Day to jump into the waves. Fearful yes – but despite this fear and just because of it, it was the defining moment of American courage.

It’s time to be courageous again. After all, we are the “home of the brave.”

Above photo by US Coast Guard Chief Photographer’s Mate Robert F. Sargent on June 6th, 1944.