They’re alive in a way that almost no Americans today even know how to be. They live with greater passion and dream with greater ambition because they are not afraid of death.
Freelance journalist Austin Tice on Facebook, explaining to friends why he was going to Syria to report on the civil war. (via the Future Journalism Project)
Update - 8/25/12 - An interesting response on Twitter to this post….
@mcaputo_public His words are beautiful but misguided. My parents are from the Middle East. Glorifying that type of passion misses the mark.
— Avital Andrews (@avitalb) August 25, 2012
My response to this was…. that I agreed. Anything to an extreme is a vice. But I thought that Tice was trying to tell us that living each day as if it was your last… not fearing that end but knowing that it can come… is missing from our American culture.
