"If you are afraid of criticism – say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” - Anonymous

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

11 September

How did Lincoln face criticism? Part One 
I'm sure you'd agree with him when he said, "If I stopped to answer every criticism leveled against me, this shop might as well close for any other business."
Or when he said, "I plan to do the best I can, and I mean to keep doing that until the end. If the end brings me out right, what's said against me won't make any difference. And if the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference."
So far so good. But there are what you might generously call grey areas. We’ll address them tomorrow in Part Two.

“Anger is never without a reason but seldom a good one.” - Benjamin Franklin

 From “Lincoln 365,” by Arnold Kunst

September 11

From mid-April 1861 until mid-April 1865 three million men North and South had seen war service. Killed in action or dead from wounds and disease were 360,000 from the North, 260,000 from the South, a grand total of 620,000 Americans.

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” – Albert Einstein

From “Me Too 365,” by Arnold Kunst

10 September

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson  

“Who are you going to be today?” - Anonymous

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

10 September

How to Destroy a Nation, one crisis at a time.

Here’s how: give in to the extremists on the fringe of your base. In 1856, five years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts [hotbed of the Abolitionist movement] gave a speech on the Senate floor denouncing Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina [hotbed of Slavery]. Senator Butler, Sumner said, "has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him. I mean the harlot, Slavery." Incendiary stuff indeed!

Although his speech exceeded the norms of parliamentary propriety the rabid Abolitionists back home ate it up.

Butler’s nephew Representative Preston Brooks, understandably, considered the speech an attack on his family’s honor.

Two days after that speech Brooks, along with an armed accomplice Lawrence Keit, entered the nearly empty Senate chamber where he found Sumner sitting at his desk. He broke his cane in beating Sumner senseless while Keit, brandishing a pistol, kept others from coming to Sumner’s aid.

The upshot?

• Sumner after a few years recuperating in Europe returned to his Senate duties permanently impaired; in the eyes of his constituents he was nothing short of a martyr to the hypocrisy of the slaveholding elite.
• Brooks, expelled from the House, was returned in a special election; he also received any number of replacement canes to be used whenever any other Yankee hypocrite needing serious correction.
• Seen from a sufficient distance it would appear that there was gagging hypocrisy on both sides. Hypocricy and cowardice, and a complete disregard for the good of the country as a whole that both men professed to love.
• A nation addicted to shouting matches before this incident was even more addicted to shouting matches after.
• Is there a lesson here for us today, addicted as we are to remarkably similar shouting matches?
• [Arguably, patriotism – then as now - should be made of sterner stuff.]
  
  
  

 

“The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others.” - Dag Hammarskjöld

 From “Lincoln 365,” by Arnold Kunst

September 10

In the late summer of 1864 a group of disgruntled party leaders, convinced that Lincoln was doomed to failure in the coming election, called for another convention to gather in Cincinnati at the end of September to choose another nominee. They included men whom Lincoln considered friends, men who had been the recipients of Lincoln's largesse. With Republicans in open revolt against their own candidate, the Democratic New York World editorialized that it was hard to tell what hurt Lincoln the most - the frontal blows from his “manly opponents” or the stabs in the back from his friends.

“I dwell in possibility.” – Emily Dickinson

From “Me Too 365,” by Arnold Kunst

9 September

“True romance which the world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius into practical power.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

“The things that really matter don’t mix with idle chatter.” – Anonymous

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

9 September

Like an active brain that dissipates its force in idle chatter, so also we cling overmuch to the ephemeral. We are built to cling, it’s true, but to the substantial, because we are built for heaven, and that’s as substantial as it gets!