I don’t understand how students can protest in favor of Hamas. There is something broken in them.
The story brought tears to my eyes. There is a life lesson in it for everyone of us.
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"...Before I get to that, let me interject here with a little Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a Viennese-born psychotherapist who was interned in Theresienstadt, where his father died of starvation and pneumonia, Auschwitz, where his mother and brother were gassed, Dachau, and Turkheim, a subdivision of Dachau. Meanwhile, his wife died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen (just as Anne Frank did).
Yet Frankl survived, and in 1946, he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, explaining how he came out of the camps alive. According to Frankl, assuming people weren’t murdered, their survival depended on finding a purpose in life: completing a task, caring for another, or simply finding meaning in the suffering. As he wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” and “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”..."
I believe, as hard as that may be to actually do that in adverse situations, that it is true.
In 1942, Eddie Rickenbacker (The American "Ace of Aces" in WWI) was on a B-17 flight the government was sending him on to remote island outposts in the Pacific to look at operations and provide inspirational leadership. They ran out of fuel, ditched at sea, and the seven other survivors spent 27 days in the wastes of the vast Pacific Ocean before they were found, all nearly dying. If they had gone one more day, they likely would have perished.
They all survived.
And it was because Rickenbaker would not let them die. Because he would not let them die, constantly badgering them, making them sing, look for food, carry on conversation and would denigrate them for wanting to die, they all grew to hate him with a white hot burning passion.
They all individually determined to live in order to spite his contempt for their desire to die! And when they were rescued, they all unfailingly credited him, in exactly those terms, for saving them, even the pilot, a Lieutenant who greatly resented Rickenbacker while in the raft (and for the rest of his life) for impinging on his prerogatives and decision making, things that were his right as the pilot of the aircraft. (Granted, he was a 35 year old Lieutenant, so he had some life experience, but I would still have deferred to Rickenbacker who was an astoundingly qualified person in nearly every aspect of life from being a race car driver, ace fighter pilot, businessman, and head of an airline, and above all, was tougher than nails with an unbendable will.)
Hating someone enough the the emotion saves your life in adversity is about as base a reason as one can get, but...it is a reason nonetheless! My wife was a critical care nurse for years, and when she heard a patient say that they wanted to die...she was convinced that was it for them, that their days were numbered. I do believe having a purpose is a reason to live.
Many years ago for a college religion class I read Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. The experience of this young couple mirrors that of Frankl. There is meaning for life and God is the source of that meaning. Blessings on this young couple and their newly discovered faith.
Thank you so much for sharing this. Great article/story.