Courage is a Rarity

We are doing Pygmalion this semester. Which brought back fond memories of 'My Fair Lady'. And when you think of that movie, you have to remember how exquisitely beautiful Audrey Hepburn was. I was reading her Wikipedia page where I saw that she was trained in ballet, and she danced to raise money for the Dutch resistance (against the Nazis) and also occasionally acted as a courier for them, delivering messages and packages. She was no more than 15 or 16. So much courage. And she was the daughter of Nazi sympathisers.
It's truly one thing to say you feel empathy and just talk about it and it's another thing to actually get up and do something about it. Its a completely different thing to try to make a difference. All of us hate the Taliban, we hate the ISIS, we hate child labour, but how many of us have the courage that Malala Yousufzai or Kailash Satyarthi do? It's all well and good to talk about the tragedy and go, "tch tch" with pity. We just can't take a stand, can we? We are so frightened that our lives and our lifestyles might be harmed in some way. We are so afraid that something might happen to us, as is happening to the world around us. The fact that these atrocities are happening in the world around us, to our own species, inflicted by our own species eludes us. How can we stand by and watch people who aren't so different from us, people with families, people with responsibilties get hurt and tortured? How can we watch a child's future get destroyed? How are we human if the instinct to protect our own kind is weaker than our fear of something untoward happening to us? How is it it that 99% of us don't have the courage to stand up for what's right, but by some miracle, there is that tiny fraction of society that still believes in humanity and had the courage to speak their mind and do what they said they would?