Category : Heroes

On December 26, 2022, Russian police stormed the apartment of nineteen-year-old University student Olesya Krivtsova, threatened her with a sledgehammer, then arrested her for terrorism. She’d been denounced to the FSB by fellow students and a vigilante troll. Her crime? An Instagram post questioning the war in Ukraine. But this isn’t a story about a teenager’s naive mistake; it’s a story about the courage to speak truth to power even in the face of its wrath, gently, and without rancor.

This post is essentially the journal I kept while following the story, which was reported in various news outlets and blogs over the months. I’ve listed the main sources at the end, especially for the pictures.

As I followed this story, I was struck by the recurring pattern of history: snitching and denunciation in a totalitarian police state; the pathos of a new generation, including University history students, blind to the lessons of the past, meekly buying into the …

Teachers can be exciting, frustrating, boring, and many other ‘ings’, as all students know. So can teaching, as all teachers know. Teachers are also chronically underpaid and overworked. In the West, we don’t often think of them as heroes. And they don’t often face a violent death for their work, as they do in Afghanistan. Yet even in the US, teaching is a profession that calls for courage.

Note! This posting contains reproductions of beautiful Islamic paintings of the Prophet Muhammed.

It can take courage to teach about air pressure and electromagnetism in California, as science teacher Greg Schiller discovered when he volunteered to help kids with their entries for a science contest. He was suspended when a school bureaucrat noticed that one of the kids’ projects was a tiny version of the marshmallow cannon President Obama praised at a White House science fair, and another used an electromagnetic coil to launch an object several … feet. They …