On Being Called Reckless
They called me reckless. The generals, the courtiers, the professionals who had been managing the war – managing, not winning – for years before I arrived. They looked at a seventeen-year-old girl with no military training who wanted to lead an army, and they used the word that people always use when they cannot find a better objection.
Reckless.
It is a word worth examining, because it is deployed so frequently against people who act that it has become, in practice, a synonym for “threatening to those who do not.”