Strength 1: Bullies and Heroes

RMF is teaching a course on Mussar, and this week's lesson is on strength. The daily exercise involves scanning the news for a story that addresses some aspect of strength and then writing something about it. I expect to post several of those, and here's the first:

The leftist revolutionary group, FARC, have held as many as 100 people hostage for years in an effort to force their will on the government and people of Colombia. Recently the Colombian government rescued fifteen of them by sending in a military mission disguised as a multinational humanitarian group.

The weak:

• FARC - They kidnapped more-or-less innocent people in an effort to extort military and financial concessions. They are Marxists, which means they are thieves who believe the ends pretty much always justify the means. They aren't necessarily cowards, but they certainly exhibit all the signs of a pathetically weak character.
• Northrop Grumman Corporation - At least three of the rescued hostages are employees of Northrop who had a moral obligation to secure their release. I don't know what Northrop has done, so I could be misjudging them, but it appears that they did essentially nothing. They had the resources to affect a rescue by almost any means they chose, yet they chose to allow their people to be mistreated and imprisoned for more than five years.

The strong:

• The Rescuers - They placed themselves into an extraordinarily vulnerable position in order to rescue complete strangers. If they had been found out (or ratted out), they could easily have been killed or become hostages themselves.

Well done, Colombia. Now go get the rest of them. You too, Northrop.