From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst
27 July
At age 91 Winston Churchill could well have looked back on a
life replete with unmitigated failure. Defeated at the polls at the very end of
a world war he was so instrumental in winning, he returned to the back benches
as head of the Opposition, and once again he was a lone voice crying out in the
wilderness, this time decrying the threat of Stalin's voracious, unprincipled
Soviet Union in the 1950’s as he had against the threat of Hitler’s voracious,
unprincipled Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.
An unabashed imperialist, he sat impotently by as the
British Empire withered into that toothless PR construct known as The British
Commonwealth - Britain as a world power was finished. He lived the vast
majority of his life in the wilderness as a member of the opposition and, if he
weren’t careful would have gone to his grave thinking his life a failure.
The rest of us knew, though, that there were a few months
during those 91 years, from the spring of 1940 on, when he stood alone on the
bulwarks of civilization itself against the bottomlessly evil and immensely
powerful threat of Nazism.
Hey, he wasn’t a failure after all!
The moral of the story: in 1940 he was THE right man for the
job, and all of us, and all of our posterity, owe this man a debt of gratitude
of incalculable proportions.
No comments:
Post a Comment