During the Korean War, Ensign Frank Blair served on a troop transport ship stationed in Japan. The captain appointed Ensign Blair to be the ship’s informal chaplain, as the ship was too small to have a formal one.
One night, the ship was caught in a severe typhoon with waves over 40 feet high. Late in the night, three of the engines had stopped working, and a crack was reported in the centerline of the ship.
In an act that must have terrified him, Ensign Blair requested permission from the captain to move around the ship to assess areas of concern firsthand.
When Ensign Blair got to the stern of the ship, he held fast to the rail with a rope tied around his waist and peered into the blackness. The ship rose and fell over a huge swell large enough that the propellors came out of the water. Ensign Blair could see they sped up as they left the water. So when they hit the water, the propellors were under tremendous load.
Ensign Blair recommended to the captain that they slow the ship even though the engineer had just recommended the opposite. The engineer wanted to outrun the storm, but Ensign Blair reasoned that the strain was too much for the remaining engines.
The captain, trusting Ensign Blair’s instinct, instructed that the ship slow down. Only two hours later, the good engine stopped working altogether. With only half power remaining, the ship was able to limp into port.
Ensign Blair concluded, “With no way to steer the ship, we’d be sitting at the bottom of the sea right now.”
Three courageous acts hallmark the survival of both ship and crew. First, Ensign Blair’s willingness to risk his own life in the storm to assess the ship from areas of greatest concern, second, to recommend something to the captain that went against what the ship’s engineer recommended, and third, the captain’s willingness to make a judgment call based on the recommendation of an informal chaplain over the ship’s engineer.
I don’t know if the engineer was present when Ensign Blair made his recommendation to the captain. I don’t know if the engineer was angry that the captain took Ensign Blair’s recommendation over his. Was there an argument, and did the captain have to calm the engineer down?
In The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, Gandalf says to Saruman, “But you have been with the enemy for too long, Saruman. Your reason has been clouded, and your will has been twisted.” In the movie adaptation, Gandalf’s statement is phrased as, “when did reason give way to madness?”
In the United States, and in other parts of the world, our reason has been clouded by loud voices that tell us divisiveness is the only way. Of course, mainstream and social media both make the situation seem worse than it is. For example, a 2019 fight between two women in their mid-40s in a grocery store over how many items were allowed in the express lane got propelled to headline news.
The challenge really isn’t that the country is as divided as the media makes it seem. The challenge is that the vast majority who reside somewhere in the middle are too preoccupied by the everyday cares of life to do anything about it. The middle majority, paradoxically, is, for the most part, silent.
Edmund Burke is credited with making the statement, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good [people] to do nothing.”
Whether you subscribe to the idea of good and evil is immaterial in this context. There are things that are good for society and things that are not. When political leaders and other social influencers become as Saruman with their will twisted toward personal gain rather than the betterment of humanity, that’s where half the problem resides. The other half is in the mixture of burnout and apathy that keep the middle majority quiet.
On the national level, it’s been a long time since we’ve had major political candidates who articulate clearly what they stand for. Instead, they’re more interested in telling us why their opponent is such a bad person. That sounds like playing not to lose rather than playing to win.
Let people shine because of their own merits, not because they highlight the demerits of others. It’s like trying to make my dim flashlight shine brighter by asking others to turn theirs off, rather than putting new batteries in my own.
While Ensign Blair was an actual voice of reason in a very real storm, we each of us have the opportunity to be a voice of reason in the storms of life. Joseph Smith once said, “A very large ship is benefited very much by a very small helm in the time of a storm, by being kept workways with the wind and the waves.”
What will it be for you: part of the storm or part of the helm?
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