Val Kilmer’s performance in the movie Tombstone is legendary. As the gunfighter Doc Holliday, Kilmer perfected an easy attitude of dangerous indifference. Holliday was a holy terror with a razor sharp wit. He frightened others because his disinterested façade concealed a violent interior ruthless, quick to act, and (due to fatal illness) with little to lose. To hear him speak, most of his life had been a purely self interested thing; but in Tombstone, he was a model of courage. That’s because in Tombstone he finally found something selfless to fight for: friendship. Wyatt Earp was his friend (one of his only friends), and Holliday proved willing to face anything, even death, to guard that friendship. In the face of overwhelming odds, utter hopelessness, and excruciating pain, Holliday found moral conviction in the defense of his friend.
That is courage, I think: a willingness to act in defense of virtue. In a sense, it is the enabler of all other virtues. It is the conviction that virtue matters on something more than an intellectual level, and that some principles are worth living and dying for. It is, perhaps, the most admired of virtues because it represents a conquest of fear, a denial of self that ultimately exalts self, and a completion of conviction – a period at the end of a passionate sentence. It inspires us because it is the portion of character that animates our better angels and forces us to recognize not those who preach principle, but those who practice it.
Think of our courageous heroes (a thoroughly redundant phrase). Their actions -- not thoughts – made them memorable and changed the world. Achilles taught the Greeks that glory, honor, friendship, and pride were more than talking points – they were beautiful, vitally important ideals. The Hebrew shepherd David, rising to face a giant, taught the Jews that faithfulness comes from trust, glory from trust to the point of action. Rosa Parks taught many Americans that it is not enough to talk about freedom – sometimes you have to stand. And movie heroes from Tombstone’s Doc Holliday to Daniel Kaffee in a Few Good Men have animated a generation trained to remember that understanding what is right and doing what is right are two totally different things.
But even with these examples, we still fail because we are short-sighted in the face of fear – we consider every cost of an action but the cost to our character and the cost to our memory. How many times, for instance, have you known what is right, and been too timid to act on that knowledge? How many times have you seen truth in jeopardy and sheepishly turned away? We constantly scare ourselves into behaving in a cowardly or calculating way rather than acting with courage in spite of the fact that we know our timidity can never lead to a fulfilling life. We know that when we look back at those we admire they were not the ones who lived long, safe, prosperous lives, but those who lived as if principle mattered, who lived diligently and defiantly in the face of fear.
What would happen if we learned from that example and from Achilles, Holliday, and Parks? What if in searching for truth we made our actions available to the defense of truth? How much would our times change? We still live in a world of injustice – broken homes, human trafficking, hungry kids, and pointless war – which courageous actions are we now willing to take?
At the end of the movie Tombstone, Doc Holliday is not rewarded for his courage, he fades into a painful death with only the friendships he fought for and the valor he gained to sustain him. But the lesson of Tombstone is that Holliday’s notoriety couldn’t be measured in its impact on his physical life, but in its impact on the quality of his existence, his legacy, and the lives that legacy changed.
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