With credit to the source cited below, here is one nice little compact spirit booster for today:
"Optimism is something that has long been in short supply in the ranks of Majority members. Today it is difficult to recall that less than a hundred years ago Europeans and their descendants ruled nearly the entire world. The watchwords among the white men who dominated politics and ideas then were, more than ever before, and less than ever since: technology, science, progress, evolution, human betterment. (...)
For most of this century, pessimism has ruled among the best, the deepest and the most prescient thinkers of our race. Titles like The Decline of the West, The Passing of the Great Race, The Rising Tide of Color, and The Dispossessed Majority are not calculated to set us turning cartwheels of confidence. And why not? The race that seemed, just a few decades ago, to be reaching for the stars, is now in imminent danger of losing the planet - and most of our fellow Members of the Minority couldn't seem to care less.
Yet it is exactly in this vexed age that optimism is required. For those of us who would inspire ourselves and the rest of the Majority to work, to struggle, and to sacrifice, optimism is realism.
Laugh (or weep) if you will, but the stern fact is that, whether our ilk is made from frailer stuff than our ancestors or not, very few of us are cut out for stoicism. To be sure, a few noble souls, such as Spengler or the incomparable Revilo Oliver, were able to carry on despite their belief that nearly everything was lost. Like that Roman soldier who, according to Pliny the Younger, expired standing guard at his post in Pompeii as smoke and ash rained down from Vesuvius, such spirits can soldier on in the face of the worst. (...)
Just a decade ago, who but a few wild-eyed optimists envisioned that Ukraine, Croatia, Slovakia and the Baltic states would be independent nations once again?
What inspired these men, these movements, these nations was a dedication that is inseparable from optimism - not simply among the leaders, but among the many thousands of men and women (among the millions of eventual followers) without whose sacrifice and support the breakthroughs and the triumphs would not have happened.
These men and women were aware that, though the future can't be known, it can be molded - by courage, by faith, by dedication, by generosity, by perseverance, by devotion to the task at hand. For them, as for the greatest of our forebears - Robert the Bruce in hiding, George Washington at Valley Forge, and their like - optimism, far from the Pollyannan'ish fate in happy endings, was ***courage over the long haul.*** (Emphasis added)
Today it is not only possible but necessary for us conscious members of the Majority to emulate our racial heroes of old. Upon our disciplined persistence, our generous support, our creativity, our patience, indeed on all our virtues the opportunity for the future triumph of our kind likely rests.
Ours is the joy and the duty, not merely to hope for the best, but to strive for the best.
(From "The Virtue of Optimism" by Moriarty, September issue of Instauration, p 7)
Thought for the Day:
"It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself."
(Abraham Lincoln)