Wus Nation
Posted January 24, 2009, 16:01 ET Comments Off
One hundred and ten years ago, Theodore Roosevelt gave his “Strenuous Life” speech in Chicago. Here’s how he began. “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”
Roosevelt wanted to make a broader point, about national greatness. “As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
That’s a view now a little discredited, after the Iraq War. Nevertheless, one can’t help but think that, at the individual level, we’ve all become a little wussified.
A great many years ago, at McGill, I met Frank Furedi, who has gone on to write of how we have become ennervated by the desire to eliminate all risks from our lives.
No springboards in swiming pools, no BB guns and, helas, cheese that tastes like plastic.
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