Looking back on Winston Churchill’s Christmas message, December 24, 1941, Washington, D.C.
We are a resilient species and have a lot to be grateful for even as our lives have been turned upside down by the deadliest pandemic in the past 100 years. When faced with challenges, I’ve always found it helpful to put things into perspective. For me, this usually involves history.
After reading Erik Larson’s
The Splendid and the Vile which definitely puts today’s challenges into perspective (I highly recommend reading this gem) – the following message from Churchill resonates 79 years later. Please read this with a nondenominational, culturally diverse mindset as Churchill’s words reflected the time.
When Deng Xiaoping arrived at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in January 1979, his country was just emerging from a long revolutionary deep freeze. No one knew much about this 5-foot-tall Chinese leader. He had suddenly reappeared on the scene after twice being cashiered by Mao, who famously described him as “a needle inside a ball of cotton.” But in 1979 he knew exactly what he wanted: better relations with the U.S. He and President Jimmy Carter appeared to be serious about resolving differences. While reporting on these meetings, I had the impression that they were aware they were appearing in a kind of buddy film, and were using the opportunity to suggest clearly that they were ready to cooperate.
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On Sunday night, congressional leaders announced that they had reached an agreement on a $900 billion stimulus bill that would issue $600 checks to every American whose income fell below a certain threshold. By Tuesday, the bill had passed.
Public reaction to the meager stimulus bill was swift and angry. David Sirota of The Daily Poster tweeted that Biden had worked with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to halve the bill and accused him of longtime austerity zealotry. Author and small business owner Dan Price tweeted that the bill does not do enough to help small businesses, noting that the first stimulus bill did nothing to help small businesses re-open.
If you like Social Security and the minimum wage, be grateful to Frances Perkins Author: Rob Caldwell Updated: 4:38 PM EST December 22, 2020
NEWCASTLE, Maine As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, a professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts gave his all-female class an unusual assignment. These young women, many of whom had grown up with wealth and privilege, were instructed to visit a nearby factory to see how the other half lived.
What Frances Perkins saw shocked her. Her family had deep roots in Maine and lived on a saltwater farm that they’d owned since colonial times. Although she’d grown up in Massachusetts, until college she had no idea of what life was like for the twelve-year-old factory workers who, for little more than subsistence wages, did repetitive, often dangerous tasks 54 hours a week.