Courage will now be your best defence against the storm that is at hand-—that and such hope as I bring.
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
The last two essays I wrote were about courage, which means I’m now legally obligated to write a third one, because everyone knows once you’ve got two, you’ve stumbled into a trilogy. And with trilogies, the pressure is real. The third one is supposed to tie it all together, the moment where every thread gets pulled tight. But if we’re honest, it’s usually the second act that outshines the rest.
The Empire Strikes Back gave us the greatest plot twist of all time, and The Two Towers gave us Helm’s Deep—a battle so epic it permanently raised the bar for cinematic battles. Second installments get to deepen the darkness and sharpen the stakes. The third installment isn’t just another chapter; it’s the one that either ties the thread or sags into a limp epilogue nobody asked for.
That’s the pressure of a trilogy: to stop winking and finally go for the heart.
So, let’s go for the heart.
The courage story we have been telling is the story of us. Many of us have been running scared, hiding behind facades, aching to know what is ours to do yet shrinking from it. The weight of it all leaves us hollow.
From that hollow place, we often reach for outrage, a kind of pseudo-courage, because real courage feels too far away.
Still, as Tolkien wrote, courage is found in unlikely places.
Which is why, as the curtain rises on this third act, the cast of our battle stands revealed.
First comes you, the courageous reader. Bruised, heart pounding, gripping a chipped IKEA sword that wobbles in your hand but gleams all the same. Stomach growling from a mixture of fear and not enough protein this morning. Your heart thumps with rage and anticipation, waiting to exhale.
And across the field: your red-hat Sauron. Not only a man, but a weather system, stitched together from fear, division, despair.
His weapons? Fear and Shame. Shame and Fear. Old as empires, quick as breath, aimed straight at the heart.
He hurls them like fireballs, shrinks hearts with them, builds armies with them. Shame and fear settle into a body before the mind can name the ache.
But since this is the trilogy capstone, let’s be even more clear.
Shame and Fear are timeless tools, sharpened and wielded anew by President Donald J. Trump, who bends them into words, stretching crime statistics until they loom like monsters at the edge of the bed.
But the numbers themselves tell a quieter story.
In 1980, when cassette tapes rattled in glove compartments and payphones swallowed quarters, the U.S. murder rate stood at 10.2 per 100,000.
By 2015—after the screech of dial-up had given way to glowing screens in every palm—that number had been cut in half, down to 4.9.
Even in 2020, masked faces at grocery stores, fear thick in the air, the rate rose only to 7.8—still below the blood-soaked peaks of the early eighties.
And today? The FBI says murders fell nearly 15% in 2024. Mid-2025 city data shows another 17% decline.
Which is to say: the statistics keep whispering, keep lowering their voices, while fear keeps shouting through a bullhorn.
And it works because fear has never needed truth. Fear only needs repetition. Fear only needs your nervous system.
Shame moves quieter, but its blade is just as sharp.
Shame slithers into language — animals, rapists, bad hombres. Not spoken for clarity, but for scorch. Words that redraw human faces into caricatures, shadows stripped of tenderness.
I never thought I would hear political leaders ridicule empathy, but here we are. Compassion has been rebranded as a toxin, the supposed poison of America. The translation is chilling: if you care, you are the problem. As if our first duty is to numb the heart before making any decision, as if a callous choice is safer than a compassionate one. Some call this guarding against “untethered empathy,” but the answer is not to banish the heart. The answer is to be in relationship with it, listening without being swallowed and letting tenderness steady us instead of distort us.
Without that steadying force of tenderness and empathy, the tactics collapse into grotesque comedy. Caught in a lie, he insults the one who noticed. Unmasked, he shames the witness for seeing. Straight out of The Emperor Has No Clothes.
Only here, when we point out the nakedness, he doesn’t blush. He pivots, sneering: You’re the filthy ones. You’re obsessed with my naked orange body.
And for that, I apologize. Truly. You did not ask to picture Donald J. Trump’s unclothed body this morning. Some horrors belong in Mordor.
Analysts call it the “firehose of falsehood.” I think it’s a flood: a torrent of lies, high-pressure, unrelenting. Sprayed across every surface until our shoes squelch and our skin puckers and we begin to forget what dry ground feels like.
And the effect is devastating. Soaked long enough in contradiction, a people may decide that truth itself cannot be known. And when nothing can be trusted, when even reality feels slippery, discourse dies.
Yet even in that silence, when fear and shame sound loudest, a person can still remember the feel of steady ground beneath their feet, can still choose to listen for the quieter voice of the heart. We can still reach for each other.
In the sensory ruin of shame and fear, the flood washes away the footholds of communal reality. We forget, even as alarms ring across our screens, that we are fragile, mortal, tethered to each other by breath. This is a dangerous condition. If we forget each other, if we give up on ourselves, all that remains is conformity to the insidious. Love gets scrambled. Kindness disappears. Hope vanishes. And cowardice keeps us alive just long enough to become the villain, shouting our own set of lies to the enemy, to our families, to ourselves.
But despair is never the whole story.
Even in ruins, an ember smolders, small, stubborn, carrying the memory of fire, the promise of dawn.
To win this battle, we must remember the words of James Finley: that we not play the cynic, and that we keep faith with the sincerity of our awakened hearts.
Which is exactly what courage itself has been whispering all along.
The word comes from the Latin cor: the heart.
Many mistake courage for fearlessness, but it’s not. It is staying true to your heart even when fear rattles your armor.
The opposite of courage is not fear.
The opposite of courage is conformity.
Courage invites you to stop hiding in the crowd. To stop running from the monsters. To step out into the light and live faithfully, not conforming to the pattern of this world. So, when the world is spewing forth toxic lies about who we are and how we should be, we must summon courage to push back, because when we are flooded with shame, we reinforce our conformity.
Shame tells us there is something inherently wrong with us. It scolds us for thinking critically, for daring to imagine differently, and it corners us until we surrender hope.
Shame kills courage, not with a single blow, but with patient precision. It’s an assassin moving freely because no one names the bodies it leaves behind.
We’ve trained ourselves to wield shame like a teaching tool. We call it toughness. We tell boys to man up. We reward men who sneer at tenderness. We warn women that vulnerability is weakness. We build classrooms, churches, boardrooms, even families, on ridicule, mockery, and “walking it off.” Then we baptize it as strength.
But it isn’t strength. It’s shame in armor strutting around like it’s courage.
Steve Magness names it clearly: real toughness “is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action”
Psychology backs this: narcissism, the chest-thumping need to look invulnerable, is rooted in shame. Jung called shame “a soul-eating emotion.” Rollo May, in The Courage to Create, insisted that the only path forward is to face our anxiety, not mask it. Brené Brown says it even sharper: “Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”
Which means our cultural idol of toughness is no virtue at all. It is only shame dressed up in armor, strutting about as if it were courage.
And shame, always, everywhere, kills courage.
So the question comes: what will you carry into this battle?
Finley whispers: I will not play the cynic. I will not break faith with my awakened heart.
May insists: The opposite of courage is not cowardice—it is conformity.
And O’Donohue, always blessing, always singing, prays: May I have the courage today to live the life that I would love.
Your armor isn’t fearlessness. It’s fidelity.
Your sword isn’t bravado. It’s authenticity.
Courage is refusing to laugh at cruelty. Refusing to bow to shame. Refusing to silence your heart.
And courage spreads. Like a battle cry across the ramparts, one act of defiance against shame can rouse an army. Social psychology confirms it: when even one person resists group conformity, the spell cracks. Helm’s Deep turns. And the thing about Helm’s Deep is it changed how we imagine battles, not just brute-force victory, but survival as hope carried through the night. Dawn glimmers.
So… picture this: you on the wall, palms sweating, knees unsteady, wishing you had packed a sandwich because battles are long and blood sugar is real. Your heart drums too fast in your chest. Shame-boulders slam into the stone.
Across the field, the voice roars: You’re not enough. Run. Toughen up. Conform.
And something quieter rises. Not a shout, not even words at first. More like breath. More like the pulse in your wrists. And then, almost ridiculously, like a whisper passed from one stubborn soul to another: Hold.
Shame only wins if you hand it the keys to your heart. And a faithful heart, trembling though it is, does not yield.
Dictators, narcissists, patriarchs—all rely on the same spell: convince you that tenderness is weakness, that kindness is failure, that shame is the glue holding society together.
But psychology, neuroscience, and the mystics converge here: a shamed people cannot heal. A courageous people can.
Fear and shame are cheap weapons. They flare hot, fast, and leave nothing but ash. But courage is stubborn. Heart-rooted. Human.
And here’s the final twist of the trilogy: courage does not slay the dragon in one blow. It keeps you standing long enough for dawn to break.
The credits may roll, but the story goes on — and it begins again each time you choose the heart. Each act of faithfulness, each refusal of shame, is how the spell is broken.
Courage does not make you invincible. It makes you human. It makes you tender. It makes you true.
And once you are faithful to that heart, the night cannot last.
Dawn glimmers.
Hope rises.
Love endures.
Roll Credits
Closing Meditation
But trilogies are never really the end. After the credits roll, we stumble into the next morning.
In the shadowed hours, one of the poems I return to is Howard Thurman’s Life Goes On. He writes of the earth steadying itself, of life persisting even through endings—that ache and assurance in the same breath. I keep it close the way you might keep a candle stub in your pocket—small, ordinary, but ready to be lit when the night deepens. I offer it here as a meditation. Life Goes On
Notes & Sources
FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics data confirm homicide rates today remain well below the 1980 peak of 10.2 per 100,000, despite recent spikes. Murders declined nearly 15% in 2024 and another 17% in early 2025 (BJS, 2010; FBI, 2024; Council on Criminal Justice, 2023).
RAND researchers coined the term “firehose of falsehood” for high-volume, contradictory propaganda (Paul & Matthews, 2016).
Scholars warn such tactics foster cynicism, eroding the possibility of shared truth (Yablokov, 2015).
Elon Musk, in a February 2025 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” describing it as a civilizational flaw ripe for exploitation (The Guardian, 2025; Inkstick Media, 2025).
Christian nationalist writers such as Joe Rigney have likewise branded “untethered empathy” as a sin, framing it as manipulative rather than virtuous (Vox, 2023).
James Finley counsels: “I will not play the cynic. I will not break faith with my awakened heart” (The Healing Path, 2023).
Rollo May: “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity” (Man’s Search for Himself, 1953/2009).
Carl Jung called shame “a soul-eating emotion” (Collected Works, 1954/1989).
Brené Brown: “Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change” (Daring Greatly, 2012).
Steve Magness contrasts false toughness with the real thing: the capacity to stay present with discomfort (Do Hard Things, 2022).
John O’Donohue blesses us: “May I have the courage today to live the life that I would love” (To Bless the Space Between Us, 2008).
Solomon Asch’s classic conformity experiments show how even one dissenter breaks the spell (Scientific American, 1955).