I recognize that people want to be positive and encouraging, and I think that is a good thing. At the same time, I feel it is also very important that we be honest with ourselves and with each other, that our hope is not false hope. I don't think I need to explain to anyone here what happens when false hopes are dashed.
So with that in mind, I am not reassured by those who tell us that "we've survived worse". First and most importantly, success - and we'll just define survival here as a success state - in the past is no guarantee of success in the future. The argument is fundamentally invalid. Logic 101.
Secondly, and I thank my friend Lilith for bringing this to my attention, saying that "we survived" does a grave disservice to those many of us who did not. It renders their suffering and their death irrelevant. We need now to learn from their struggles, not to dismiss them.
When faced with a crisis, I do not believe it is broadly helpful or appropriate to point out all of the things we have survived in the past. Reliving past victory celebrations distracts us from the task at hand and it encourages us to be complacent, to encourage the sort of magical thinking that tells us that good always triumphs over evil. Even the people who literally write magical fantasy stories aren't this lazy. The One Ring doesn't just pick itself up and throw itself in the fires of Mount Doom.
