MORAL courage, the willingness to brave rejection, opposition and opprobrium, has never been a common virtue. Not in Bermuda. Not in the world at large. Which is why it's generally regarded as the acid test for heroism - that ability to maintain what Hemingway famously called grace under pressure even when the pressure becomes almost too overwhelming to bear. Or, indeed, even after it does become too unbearable for the average man or woman to endure.

There's certainly nothing wrong with being average. But there's even less wrong with being above average - being extraordinary, allowing yourself and your actions to be guided by an internal moral compass rather than day-to-day expediency.

To place the common good above personal ambition. To demonstrate independence of thought and action in an environment that prizes conformity and inertia above all else and which only accepts change if it creeps in at much the same exhausted pace as a horse-drawn carriage on a summer day. To fight the longest of odds and the entrenched and jealously guarded interests of the few so the cause of the many could be served. This is the stuff that heroism is made of. This is the raw material moral courage is built from.

And few, if any, could argue that Dame Lois Browne Evans did not possess all of these qualities. Few could deny she was anything other than a hero.

Her long list of accomplishments is too familiar to bear repeating in full. It's sufficient to say she threw the longest of shadows over the course of Bermuda's modern development, championing the need for social justiee and social evolution to keep pace with the island's runaway economic growth.

But what's gone little remarked on is the fact that Bermuda's first female lawyer, first female Opposition Leader and first female Attorney General, a woman who strived throughout her public career to rouse the dozing conscience of this island, did not just face economic and social resistance.

She also confronted chauvinism as deeply rooted in the island's soil as the Bermuda cedar once was when she launched herself into public life in the 1950s - a chauvinism that still exists here today in vestigial form.

Her ability to challenge - and ultimately best - what were literally "Old Boy Networks" that existed across Bermuda's racial and social spectrum make her achievements all the more remarkable. And commendable.

Dame Lois acquired more influence and more respect than any other leader in the island's recent history. Rarely has there been a public figure here who has been at once so loved and so eminently loveable.

She was an outsized personality and her mistakes were sometimes as epically-scaled as her triumphs. No one, not even our heroes, are entirely without fault; they sometimes - at least temporarily - dislodge themselves from their own pedestals without any assistance from their opponents.

But she was a highly principled woman who always had virtuous ends in mind even if the means she sometimes chose to pursue them proved to be either questionable or inapplicable in the Bermudian social or cultural context. She openly rued the day she accepted an invitation to tea with the Soviet diplomatic legation in London while in the UK helping to midwife Bermuda's democratic Constitution in the mid-1960s. It was the height of the Cold War. It was a time when the Soviets were using their battle-fatigued Cuban proxy Fidel Castro to export violent revolution throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America. It was just two or three years after Castro and his patrons in Moscow had forced the hands of the nuclear Doomsday Clock to one minute to midnight during the superpower stand-off over Soviet missile batteries in Cuba. Dame Lois said accepting that one social invitation did more harm to the Progressive Labour Party's electoral prospects than Jack Tucker and Sir Edward Richards combined.

Similarly, her acquiescence in the PLP's decision to retain the services of Geoffrey Bing rebounded on her spectacularly. Bing, a British-born lawyer, doctrinaire Marxist and political gun-for-hire during the early days of decolonisation, had provided the quasi-legalistic framework for Kwame Nkrumah's brutal dictatorship in Ghana before being engaged to advise the PLP on its policies and electoral strategy in the run-up to the 1968 General Election, the first contested under the new Constitution. The resulting drubbing made Dame Lois realise that a fleet will only move as fast as its slowest ship. And it wasn't just the slowest Bermudian ships that were, of course, extremely wary of following the peril-fraught course/heading recommended by this near-demented navigator cum political mercenary.

But she learned from these occasional mistakes; she learned in the trial-and-error fashion that separates the genuinely progressive, evolving mind from the merely dogmatic one.

For an unwavering moral consistency isn't at all the same thing as adopting that foolish, unwavering consistency which is the hallmark so many little - and permanently closed - minds in Bermuda.

Those who regard their principles as inviolate often adapt their tactics to suit changing or particularly challenging circumstances while their overriding strategic objective always remains the same.

They remain steadfast in their resolve but understand the spirit of compromise will sometimes far better suit their purposes than unyielding instransigence.

Because they fear stalemate - or, even worse, the possibility of their ideals being thrown back into even a temporary retreat from the cultural and political front lines - they do what they must to keep those principles perpetually advancing

They do so regardless of the indifference or hostility they encounter. Regardless of the obstacles and resistance. Regardless of the contempt and the sometimes supreme indifference. And regardless of any personal consequences, no matter how potentially dire.

The good that men and women do in Bermuda often isn't just interred with them, it's either taken for granted - or, too often -, ignored during their lifetimes. Small island, small minds, as the old folk used to say.

So how very appropriate that this woman who set the moral tone for Bermuda's political discourse for so many decades, who stirred us from our complacency and made us question sometimes deeply-held but entirely wrongheaded assumptions about ourselves and our island, is being remembered after her death for her indispensible and immeasurable contributions. If you ever need to be reminded of why it's in fact better to be above average than just average, look no further than her sterling example. - Tim Hodgson