By David Brooks | The New York Times
(Editor’s note: Opinion pieces are posted for discussion purposes only.)
At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama told the story of a group of Americans who were captured by the Nazis during World War II. The head of the German prison camp gave an order that the Jewish soldiers step forward. An American master sergeant, Roddie Edmonds, ordered all of his men to step forward. The Nazi held a gun to the sergeant’s head and said, “These can’t all be Jewish.” The sergeant replied, “We are all Jews.” Rather than execute all of the men, the Nazi backed down.
That kind of moral heroism took place in extraordinary circumstances. But even today there are moral heroes making sacrifices similar, if less celebrated, to the one that those soldiers were ready to make.
