Quote of the Week...from Winston Churchill

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.   ---Winston Churchill

Having gone and seen the new movie The Darkest Hour just last week, I thought it would be timely to use a Winston Churchill quote for the second time on this blog.  It was he who galvanized public and political support in Britain and its Commonwealth for their effort to fight Hitler's Nazi Germany and his allies essentially by themselves for a year and a half ...the Soviet Union was then in a non-aggression pact with Germany and America wouldn't enter the war until December of 1941.  But on May 10, 1940 Neville Chamberlain resigned when he could not forge a unity coalition government...the Labor Party insisted on Churchill, so King George asked him to replace Chamberlain.  The situation was dire: the Nazis had just overrun Norway and were now invading Belgium on their way to an unexpectedly quick rout of France...with several hundred thousand British troops trapped on the ground there.  It all looked hopeless as the possibility of most of the British Army being decimated looked more and more probable.  There was a defeatist attitude in the War Room and Churchill was being prodded by the influential Conservative Party leader Lord Halifax to opt for peace talks with Hitler.  Instead, Churchill, who had decades of experience with war strategy and tactics, devised a bold scheme to evacuate the troops from the beaches of Dunkirk with the aid of a flotilla of hundreds of private boats, crossing the channel back and forth under enemy bombardment.  Churchill's political struggles and eventual triumph over Halifax in the first few weeks of his administration was the focus of the movie, which I heartily recommend (Gary Oldman's portrayal of Churchill was amazing)...

It runs against the grain of human nature...and even possibly common sense...to, when confronted with storms, be they personal or more societal in nature, face them with hope and a clear mind.  The tendency, sad to say, is for folks to either bury themselves in denial and/or angrily look for scapegoats in order to alleviate themselves of any responsibility for the problems or their resolution.  Having an optimistic attitude immediately opens oneself to looking for possibilities to make things better...but, as Winston Churchill would agree, it must be based on soberly recognizing the facts as they really are, no matter how dark things might appear...