Assuming this goes to press, it will be my 30th Post article. Well it won't really, because one of the previous ones was an episode of Whatever Next that I didn't write. It is, however (assuming it goes to press) my 15th I Couldn't Care Less article. This is the fifteenth occasion I have had the nerve to lecture anyone who is reading on how to do things in a fashion I consider acceptable. Why stop now?

More importantly, by the time you read this it will, at the very earliest, be the 11th of November. Armistice Day, and the day widely used to remember the dead of all wars everywhere, on every sides. For me this time every year the same question arises: Would I have done that? Would I have had the courage to drop what I was doing, pick up a rifle and take on the enemy? Or would I have wet myself, burst into tears and been taken away in an ambulance on day one?

Fortunately it seems many of us will never have to find out. But that doesn't mean that we can't still be courageous. In the 21st century I believe we still need the raw nerve to stand up and demand that things are the way that we want them to be. So here are some things that can be ruined if we are too afraid to face the risks:

The internet is a marvellous thing. For me it certainly is. As a carer, the help it offers me is immeasurable. I can order prescriptions online, I can chase information about benefits, find advice and support groups and find the location and transport links for medical facilities in unfamiliar parts of the country. Also, as crucially as any of these, I can keep in touch with the rest of the world. I can talk to my friends and family. Now here is a thing which, like all things which allow human communication, has many benefits and many failings. It can allow people to share and communicate all kinds of obscene and awful and dangerous things. So we could avoid the internet, keep away from it, limit it or shut it down altogether. Or we could accept that the world, whether real or virtual, is a risky, scary place, and we can only take advantage of the world if we are brave enough to face the risks and run them down, rather than trying to hide from them.

Which brings me to point number two. Freedom. I know I just went on about terrorism and facing down risks, but that doesn't mean I am in favour of arresting people without showing them evidence, denying them legal advice and detaining them indefinitely without trial. It may be that some of them prove to be terrorists, but I would rather run the risk myself than allow people who are innocent until proven otherwise to be arrested and held against their will. It violates one of our most central legal principles and it makes us nothing better than kidnappers. It is also a dangerous first step to governments being able to arrest people because they claim it must be thus. Well it mustn't, so I would like us to stand up and be brave enough to face that danger, too.

Finally (lecture almost over- – sorry it's not very cheery this week) I would like us to be a community. Intervening, even talking to people who wonder along looking angry, miserable or mental, can be very scary to do. But if we all, as a group, have the courage to make everyone, absolutely everyone, one of us, then nobody has cause to be alone unless they wish to be. Go on – I dare you.

To summarise: My wife has made me promise not to get involved if I see a woman being raped. I take her point, but I would not be the person I want to be unless I did what I could to help, even at the risk of being stabbed. I can't say I would have the courage, but I hope I would. And I hope the perpetrators would be given a proper trial and the right sentences for the crime they had been proven to have committed. And then I hope that the woman would be able to keep in touch with me, if she wanted to, via some sort of website for victims of crime or something.

Wouldn't that be nice?

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