Kevin McCabe: Great things are never easy or safe

By REP. KEVIN MCCABE

What people want, more than comfort, more than money, more than convenience, is something worth living for and worth dying for. Strip away the noise of modern life and that truth remains. Men and women are not built merely to consume, to be entertained, or to drift from one pleasure to the next. We are built for purpose, for duty, and for sacrifice in service to something greater than ourselves. History proves this again and again.

Great societies do not rise because life is easy. They rise because people coalesce around something they believe matters enough to demand courage, endurance, and even death. When that belief takes hold, ordinary people do extraordinary things. They stand firm under pressure, endure hardship, and accept risks no amount of comfort could ever justify.

Christianity understood this from the beginning. Christ did not promise ease or safety. He called His followers to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Him. That was not symbolic language to the early church. It was a literal invitation to persecution, imprisonment, and martyrdom. Yet the faith did not shrink. It grew because it offered meaning that transcended fear and death. People lived for the Gospel and died for it because it gave their lives eternal weight.

That same truth shaped the founding of the United States. America was not born out of convenience or comfort. It was born out of conviction. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence knew exactly what they were risking. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor because liberty was not negotiable. Freedom was worth dying for, and without that belief, this nation would never have existed.

The American Revolution was sustained not only by soldiers and statesmen, but by moral clarity preached from the pulpit. The Black Robed Regiment understood that people needed a cause worth sacrificing for. Alaska’s pioneers understood the same truth. They believed building a state at the edge of the world mattered, and that belief carried them through storms, setbacks, and loss.

In many ways, Alaska is the purest example of this reality. Our state was not built by abstract theories or symbolic gestures. It was built by men and women, Native and non Native, who faced a land that did not forgive weakness or reward hesitation. They crossed mountains, rivers, ice, and ocean. They trapped, fished, mined, logged, drilled, flew bush planes, and built roads where none existed. Some of them never came home, and in many parts of Alaska their names are still known because the land remembers who paid the price.

Alaska is not the product of land acknowledgements or academic arguments about who owned what centuries ago. It is the product of human courage. Alaska exists because people chose to stay when leaving would have been easier, to build when quitting would have been safer, and to invest sweat, blood, and sometimes their lives into a future and a state they might never personally enjoy. Native communities survived and thrived in one of the harshest environments on earth. Non Native settlers joined them later, not in search of comfort, but in acceptance of hardship. Together, they forged a state that rewards grit, responsibility, and self reliance, whether government approved or not.

We honor those men and women not by freezing Alaska in history, but by continuing their work. We dishonor them when we act afraid of our own potential. Alaska’s founders did not risk everything so future generations could be too timid to build, too cautious to develop, or too politically correct to use the resources God placed beneath our feet. They did not brave this land so we could outsource our energy, our jobs, and our future to places that do not share our values or our standards. We are not building just for tomorrow. We are building for the next generation.

Too often today, we pretend people can be satisfied with comfort alone. We tell them to stay quiet, stay entertained, and trust systems that avoid hard choices. The result is not progress. It is stagnation. Alaska cannot afford that mindset. This state was never meant to be easy. Nothing good ever is. Alaska was meant to be earned.

We see it in every shipwreck, every airplane wreck, and every monument to failure we pass. Building Alaska exacts a price. It always has. But it is worth it.

If we want a strong Alaska, a free people, and a future worthy of those who came before us, we must recover the courage that built this place. We must be willing to develop our resources responsibly, to build infrastructure, to create opportunity, and to accept that progress always carries risk. Not reckless risk, but real risk, the same kind our predecessors accepted without hesitation.

People thrive when they are called to something higher than comfort. Alaska was built by people who answered that call. The least we can do is refuse to be afraid of carrying it forward.

Rep. Kevin McCabe is an Alaska legislator representing District 30, Big Lake. He has lived in Alaska for 43 years, served in the US Coast Guard, as a Boeing 747 captain, and was a volunteer firefighter.

Kevin McCabe: Let’s get back to building great big durable things in Alaska