"Hope"

 It is fitting that an essay on ‘hope’ should be sent during the week we remember the 79^th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, for it was hope for its success that filled the hearts of the millions of those who for most of a decade had lived under the boot of Nazism.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Hope”

June 9, 2023

 

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.

Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”

                                                                                                                                Helen Keller (1880-1968)

                                                                                                                                Optimism, 1903

 

Hope is a verb and a noun. It reflects one’s optimism and posits one’s positive, achievable goals. It should not be confused with Walter Mitty-like grandiose dreams. It speaks of the possible. Hope has been around as long as humans. Speaking to the Corinthians five decades after the death of Jesus, Paul spoke of the need for faith, hope, and charity. Helen Keller, blind and deaf since age two, wrote the words quoted in the rubric above while a student at Radcliffe. Two months before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in Washington, D.C.: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” 

 

Politically, hope has been absent in the U.S. for almost a generation. From the end of World War II until the assassination of President Kennedy, America was filled with promise. We faced challenges. Bomb shelters were built for fear of nuclear annihilation, and the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik lent concern that the Soviets were leading in the space race. But our nation’s response was positive, and we felt safe. On May 25, 1961, in a speech before a joint session of Congress, President Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade – a goal the nation achieved when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969. Sadly, Kennedy did not live to see this, but the U.S., during those years, had a can-do spirit, driven by admiration for Country, self-confidence, and hope.

 

In the second half of the 1960s, with Vietnam, student riots, and a drug-infested and sexually voyeuristic Woodstock, hope dissipated.  Malaise set in during the 1970s, as the country experienced Watergate and the first ever resignation of a President, the ignoble evacuation of Saigon, an oil shock, inflation, prolonged recession, and a stock market that treaded water over ten years. The confidence we felt in those post-War years was gone. But by summer’s end 1982 a feeling of relief spread across the land, and the stock market began to rise. The dragon of inflation had been slain by Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, at the cost of a short but steep recession. Ronald Reagan, a gifted speaker filled with optimism and confident in America’s future, had been elected President in 1980. His “morning in America” persisted into the 1990s, only to be impaled by a tech bubble and the attack on September 11, when Islamic extremists flew four airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing almost 3000 civilians.  

 

In the ensuing twenty-two years, with credit and bank crises, spiraling debt, inflation, and political division, we have never regained that sense of confidence and hope. Many thought the election of Barack Obama signaled such a return. But unfortunately, he chose to deepen racial divide. Today the nation is filled with anger, despair, and a sense of helplessness. Even Moms for liberty is seen as a hate group. We are divided by race, gender, and sexual orientation. Identity has replaced merit. Equality of outcome is deemed more equitable than equal opportunity. Urban politicians, dependent on donations from teachers’ unions, refuse to offer school choice to their cities’ poorest residents. For too many, persistent and rising welfare benefits lead to dependency. Instead of two-parent families, it is said to “take a village” to raise a child.

 

Police are under attack and crime has risen. Our southern border is porous. Cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia have lost not only their charm but their livability, as stores are shuttered and the homeless defecate on streets. A sense of impending doom has descended on the nation’s young, as climate scaremongers say we face an existential crisis, if we persist in using gas stoves and do not drive EVs. Drug use is up, as are suicides, especially among the young. Teachers’ unions have become the most important financial backers of Democrat politicians, yet student scores keep declining, affecting most seriously the poorest in inner cities. Blacks are told to express their grievances, that their fate is to be a victim, dependent on government largesse. Whites are told they are oppressors. The ladder that allows for ascension up the socio-economic steps has been yanked away by the political left. 

 

One consequence has been a decline in birthrates, which, more than climate change, pandemics, or AI, threatens mankind. Exponential economic growth depends upon exponential growth in the labor force. Fertility rates below 2.1, needed to maintain a population, mean an aging and, ultimately, a declining population. Some of that can be made up with immigrants, but, as Malcolm Collins wrote recently in The Telegraph, those in the U.S. “…often don’t realize the pools from which they draw (Central America, South America, and the Caribbean) collectively fell below the sustainable rate in 2019.” This is a problem for the West. Mr. Collins added: “Western countries are like farmers draining an evaporating pool to keep their crops healthy, and ignoring the situation because the pond is unlikely to totally dry up in their lifetimes.”

 

Government, not individual initiative, is seen as the answer to all problems. “We have to paint a dark, bad picture because that’s what justifies more spending,” said Robert Doar, who once ran social services for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an interview in last weekend’s The Wall Street Journal. Joe Biden projects the image of a doddering old man. Donald Trump, a man I supported twice for President, looks backward, focused on retribution, rather than a brighter future. E Pluribus Unum, the 1782 motto of the United States, is no longer applicable, replaced by the metaphor of a salad bowl, which emphasizes differences, rather than what we have in common. 

 

But the future is never clear. Habits and attitudes change. What climate fear mongers overlook is the ability of species to adapt, and for the Earth to adjust through, for example, what is known as the Iris Effect, which exerts “a significant negative climate feedback that stabilizes tropical temperatures and limits climate sensitivity.” This according to Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, writing in the February 2022 issue of Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. They were quoted by Andy Kessler in the June 5, 2023 issue of The Wall Street Journal. Cyanobacteria, one of the earliest known forms of life, has been around, according to microbiologists, for 3.5 billion years. Ctenophores date back 700 million years, Sponges 600 million years, Horseshoe Crabs and the Elephant Shark over 400 million years. Man first evolved in Africa between two and six million years ago, during the late Cenozoic Era. He has lived through myriad temperature changes. Adaption, not scare tactics, should be part of any environmental plan.

 

Man is almost infinitely resourceful and adaptive. He is aspirant, and, when allowed by the political system under which he lives, he is creative, and innovative. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, in the depths of the 1930s Depression, in the early days of World War II, at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in the jungles of Vietnam, after the attack on 9/11, and during the credit crisis of 2008-9, it was hard to be confident of America’s future. But those earlier periods – the two decades after World War II and the 1980s-1990s – showed what was possible. We need leaders today who are honest about our challenges, not issuing canards to deflect the truth. We need leaders who, unafraid to acknowledge our faults, emphasize our goodness. We need leaders who offer hope, not fear. At the start of the Civil War, but in a posthumously published poem, Emily Dickinson wrote; “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”

"A Cockeyed Optimist"

 It’s raining in Connecticut today, the greyness of the day matching the mood of the Country, as Democrats seem intent on moving forward with Biden as their standard bearer in a quest for another four years in the White House, while Donald Trump seems intent on fracturing Republicans and undermining their attempt to replace Mr. Biden. 

 

Perhaps this essay, with its message of hope, will lift your mood.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“A Cockeyed Optimist”

April 23, 2023

 

“Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.”

                                                                                                                William James (1842-1910)

                                                                                                                The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902

 

“I know America is a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression. I know it because I’ve lived it.”

                                                                                                                Senator Tim Scott (R-SC)

                                                                                                                Speech, April 12, 2023 

 

It is easy to be pessimistic:

 

Americans’ trust in government, according to a June 6, 2022 Pew Research Center study, has fallen from 75% in 1958 when the study began to 20% today. Total Fertility Rates, which measure the average number of children born to a female over their lifetime, have declined in the United States from 3.58 in 1960 to 1.64 in 2020. (To maintain population, the TFR must be 2.1.) The numbers portend a shrinking labor force and an increasing number of retirees. A February 2023 WSJ/NORC poll showed that only 21% of Americans feel their children will be better off financially than they are. Belief in God has fallen to 81%, down six percentage points from 2017, and the lowest since the question was first asked by Gallup in 1944.

 

Less than half of all Americans express a great deal of confidence in the military, with 77% of young Americans physically unfit to serve. Only 9% of those eligible to serve wish to do so, according to an op-ed in the April 15-16, 2023 issue of The Wall Street Journal by the authors of Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America. For more than fifty years, Cassandras have been predicting climate apocalypse. A generation ago, the UN Environment Program claimed that “…entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” Undeterred by past failures, they continue to predict catastrophe. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently issued a report: “We’re hurtling down the road to ruin and running out of time to change course.” Failure has not chastened these prophets of doom.  

 

Wherever we turn, there is bad news. Crime rates and mass shootings make daily headlines, with perpetrators too often seen as “victims.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, weekly earnings for private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, declined 3.6% over the past two years, the longest stretch since the 1970s. High school math and reading scores on international tests (PISA) remain low, while political indoctrination is high. Interest rates on U.S. Treasuries have risen, but remain below the rate of inflation, implying negative real returns. Abortion is a super-charged political issue, yet, according to the Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions in the U.S. was 930 thousand in 2020 versus 1.6 million in 1990, and 93% of all abortions occur in the first trimester, according to the same source. Rational debate is off the table, and ignored is the wisdom of President Clinton from 1992: “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” Keep in mind, we were all fetuses once and were given the chance to live. At this point, it looks like voters in 2024 could be faced with the same Hobson’s choice they had in 2020 – the Scylla of a cognitively challenged and corrupt Joe Biden, or the Charybdis of an ego-infested, unprincipled showman, Donald Trump. As a nation, can we not have better choices? Despite two individuals having declared for the Democrat primary, the DNC says there will be no Democrat primary debates.

 

The world is dangerous. Our enemies have the ability to nuke our cities. They have the means to disrupt our financial markets, banking and utility systems, and air travel, via cyber warfare or knocking out satellites. Commerce would be brought to a stand-still. And all the while, our political class is more interested in stuffing their bank accounts and gender identification than in enabling our military and cyber defense systems; universities are more interested in protecting students from harmful words than in preparing them to become good citizens, and the media would rather delegitimize those with conservative political views than expose weakness in our nation’s defense systems. 

 

It is easy to see the future in dark tones. And yet, no matter how bleak the world seems; no matter how foolish politicians responsible for the management of our nation’s affairs act or how biased is the media, and no matter the phony accusations of racism, idiotic calls for stakeholder capitalism, or the encouragement of transwomen to compete in women’s sports, I awake each morning and thank God for the fortune to have been born and to live in this country at this time: Conservatives are speaking out. Parents are fighting to regain control of their children’s education. The Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard was recently formed, even though it has only attracted 71 faculty members out of 1,196 eligible. Young people are taking an interest in public service, brilliant and sensible ones like Vivek Ramaswamy – at 37, a man closer in age to my grandchildren than my children. Combined with others, these factors tell me that all is not lost. I look at our three children, their spouses, and the ten grandchildren they have produced, and I am inspired for the future – a future I may never see, but one in which I have hope, in which I believe.

 

The left has become shrill as they use authoritarian means to defend what they claim are democratic values: They do not allow school choice for the nation’s poor, because it violates the wishes of teachers’ unions; they substitute racism and gender preference for merit, thereby destroying the historic excellence of schools and colleges, an excellence which allowed people and the county to prosper; they demonize conservative blacks like Justice Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell for the temerity to think for themselves, rather than comply to a prescribed progressive line; they allow children as young as ten to select their gender preference, which has created an understandable backlash among concerned parents. The shrill left has invaded Wall Street and corporate board rooms, with innocent sounding calls for “stakeholder” capitalism, ignoring the fact that every successful company must balance the needs of owner/shareholders, employees, customers, and communities, without the need to train workers in “bias breaking,” “psychological safety,” and other forms of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” words that mean whatever the corporate executive wants them to mean. 

 

As for immigrants, the United States has always attracted those with a sense of “can-do.” Immigrants who come legally do not come for handouts. They are attracted by opportunities our nation offers: its freedom; its democratic form of government; its economy based on free market capitalism; and, most important, its belief in the individual, that if one uses his or her native talent, works hard, adheres to the law, respectful of others, and is personally responsible, then success will ensue. Education is at the core of individual success, which is why teachers’ unions have become an impediment, especially in the nation’s poorest sections. It is why the push for charter schools, or for letting money follow the student – for choice – is critical if we want to be fair to those less advantaged. And that push for choice has become more prevalent.

 

A pessimist is one who looks at the present and extrapolates all that is wrong and concludes that that is the future. An optimist is one who studies the past, lives the present, and then eyes the future and dreams of what is possible. With that as a definition, I remain an optimist. Reason tells me that the obstacles we face are formidable. It’s easy to be pessimistic, but in my heart, I feel as did Mitzi Gaynor in South Pacific, as war loomed around, when she sang: “I hear the human race/ is fallin’ on its face/ and hasn’t very far to go…But I’m only a cockeyed optimist.”