optimism3 - Monday Morning Memo

Get your news secondhand,

from someone who is not a news writer.

The goal of the news writer
is to make you indignant,

alarm you, frighten you.

Anger and fear
are poisonous to optimism.

And then we have
the political talk show hosts

running in circles shouting,

“The sky is falling, the sky is falling!”

Do you really want to live angry,
suspicious and frightened?

Our nation is addicted to news and sports

because we would rather be angry than bored.

So don’t be bored.

Pick something worth doing, then do it.

Talk about it wherever you go.

Make your own news.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This is, I repeat, the best way of life on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

- Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a speech delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953, from the Statler Hotel in Washington, D.C.

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