Good Third Wednesday of January of Refrigerated and Glaciated Good News! There was a DailyKos diary a couple weeks ago of the Weather Persuasion that reported our Not-favorite Phenom of 2012, the Polar Vortex, was booked for a Return Engagement. It was promised for an opening around the 12th of January (which, around Minnesota parts, was when the bottom fell off of the thermometer) and, as you can tell waking up this morning, is DEFINITELY still with us. (Monday in the Twin Cities was the first Zero or Below “High” in a few years…..) The promise was that this impact would keep impacting North America for about 6 weeks, so 1 down, 5 to go. Stay warm, bundle up, and let’s see what the 3rd Wednesday in February feels like. That’s when I am next slated to sit on the organ bench of the Good News Wurlitzer and throw myself onto the keys and stops of flying this Round Up.
Of course, you didn’t come to the Gnuville Breakfast Brunch for the weather report, and likely you have other sources for your sports info. You’ve come for the News, and not just any, MSM, both-sider, Doomer news either. This is the Good News Round Up, and this little corner of the Internet is a daily and daylight Aurora Borealis Display of stuff going Right and stuff Getting Better. (These sometimes take the form of stuff going wrong or stuff getting worse for various fascists, MAGAS, Xtian nationalists…. but Bad News for them is Good News for Us!) So step inside the Gnuville Breakfast Brunch! I invite you to top off your mug with your favorite coffee blend, or blow slightly on your impressive, just-right, just-how-you-like it tea blend to get it to sipping temperature. If you are of the mocha-cocoa persuasion, now is the time to sprinkle on that fresh dash of cinnamon or nutmeg and add a fresh dollop of whipped cream (tall enough to leave a dab on the tip of your nose for that first sip.) Otherwise, the Mimosa Bar has your favorite fluted concoction in your favorite fruitiness and chilliness.
Now follow your noses to the aroma of croissants, cinnamon rolls, breakfast proteins and even the piquant scent of cold corn flakes in the bowl just before the milk hits them. Come one, come all into the Feet Up Lounge with your beverage, your edibles of the morn, your pixel screen, your newspapers, journals, magazines, even thoughtful letters. Here there are kitchen table chairs with kitchen tables, cozy booths (appropriately nicknamed “snugs” in the British Isles), wingback chairs, recliners, sofas, side tables and so-called coffee tables (for sometimes even holding coffee, but usually when there are no guests around, for holding a couch pillow and a pair of slippered or socked feet.) After all there are Good News stories to peruse, comments to make, recommends to click, digressions to drop in, expansions to inflate, corrections to amend and emend (even, if you must, i-mend, o-mend, u-mend, and sometimes y-mend). If you have a reaction, a memory, a thought, a question, or a snark/chuckle, please post it as you will. We’d love to hear from you because everyone chipping in to this Internet Kettle of Stone Soup is what makes for a tasty, heart-warming, soul-lifting pot of goodness for your Wednesday.
(As is my custom here as keeper of the History Corner, you will note vintage items of the Good and the Goofy, brought out and thawed from January 17ths of times long ago. It’s not just US who are the Good and the Goofy; we have examples and heroines from the Past who inform our Present with insights and hope and smiles as well.)
>>>>>>» Roger Stone has been a rat bastard since the Nixon Administration. (He likely was before, but he’s been public about it since then.) He has also managed to avoid getting in real trouble for his words and deeds, either getting sued (civil cases) or breaking the law (criminal cases). But now it seems in the plotting and planning for the J6 Coup that Roger said to an ex-NYPD cop that he thought some serious violence was needed to cow the opposition and to show just how determined the J6 Coup was willing to go. He told this fellow conspirator that either Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell of CA and/or Jerry Nadler of New York….needed to die…..publicly. Whew!
Now it looks like not only did Roger say this, but he said it ON TAPE (Lordy, there are tapes!) The tape surfaced about a week ago, and Roger immediately cried “Fake!” and “AI generated!” AKA “I’m being framed!” Well, eventually we are going to find out. THIS STORY notes the Capitol Police (who have a detective arm) are investigating the tape….and circumstances…..and witnesses. There will be forensics type scientists examining the tape. AND the FBI is co-ordinating with the Capitol Police. So, once again, Bad News for a Trumper is Good News for Us!
>>>>>» Peter Navarro is one of the endless arrogant pricks who worked in the Trump Squattage in the White House. After the Mango Menace left office, Navarro was subpoenaed by the House J6 Committee to testify. Navarro refused, and things escalated to the point that the House majority voted to refer the matter to the DOJ. They did, and charges of contempt of Congress were brought. Navarro had a trial and WAS CONVICTED on 2 counts. (Max penalty on each: $10,000 fine and up to 1 year in jail. You can do the math.) So. like fellow Contemptuant (?) Steve Bannon, Navarro is awaiting sentencing, scheduled for January 25. On the way there, Navarro and his lawyers keep throwing motions at the court of a “hail mary” persuasion. In one of the latest (and almost last) of these, a COURT HAS DENIED Navarro’s request for a new trial. Looks like January 25 (next Thursday!) will be a big news day for us and a Law & Order gavel thwack for Peter. Yay!
Good News from Science and Engineering
>>>>>We are gaining on it…..the Future, that is. Will it be quick enough and strong enough to offset, even reverse, climate change? THAT is THE question of the age.
But there ARE hopeful signs. There are wind power windmills are everywhere, even off-shore. On the highways you may have seen a Loo-oong truck with extra warning flags moving one of those giant fan blades to a new wind farm being set up in the Nebraska Panhandle.
Those things are BIG, and… those steel towers that hold the blades? Well, the taller the better (catches more wind) but to make them taller means a bigger footprint, that is, a larger circle on the ground. Steel can be made that big around BUT tunnels, embankments and bridges have not gotten any bigger or stronger. Getting these giant pieces TO the wind farms is becoming a growing headache.
Now comes THIS HEARTENING STORY from the land of IKEA. The Swedes are successfully testing a windmill tower made from WOOD. Just bring in the right pieces of lumber, a barrel of Gorilla Glue, and a set of non-language instructions, cartoon style, so anyone can assemble their very own “BJORN” Winden-Tuur. (OK, so electrical utility companies prefer written assembly instructions and it doesn’t have to come quite packed flat; then too, putting a BJORN wind tower on your car top to get it home may be very hard on the car.) But building these graceful signs of hope from renewable sources is a win-win.
>>>>>>>Of course, once you generate that electricity from renewable sources, and its not used immediately, it helps to be able to STORE it. So the game is on to improve BATTERY power, big time. Its been a long time since you stored your rooftop electrical power in your pair of D-sized flashlight batteries, and there have been improvements. We have learned to say “lithium-ion” and “nickel-cadmium.” Now comes THIS JAW DROPPING StORY from Harvard University…..School of Engineering. (Huh! I thought Harvard sent all their engineering types up the road to MIT...) How about a solid-state battery, using lithium, that can be discharged and recharged over 6000 times !? An amazing number, putting current tech in the shade. Even better, a full recharge takes…..minutes! Good News indeed!
>>>>>>I tell you those 2 stories have me sipping thoughtfully from my coffee mug. BTW, do you brew a new pot now and again? Sure. And the used grounds go…..where? Yeah, like you, I put them in the lined trash can under the sink…..which goes out to the can in the garage…..which every Friday gets picked up by the trash guys. I mean, reusing coffee grounds? I think some people do gardening things with them but mostly…...its a pitch. Maybe now is the time to reconsider. THIS BRAINY BUNCH of Australian engineers have found a way to process used coffee grounds and use them to help make concrete…….30% stronger than the usual stuff! Whoa! Organic recycling producing…..semi-organic concrete? And a boost to construction that eases resource exploitation? Sign us all up!
>>>>>>>>Now lest you think science and engineering is a “modern” advancement (and it is, actually) the roots of it go WAY Back. How far back? Well, we know all sorts of ancient peoples were stargazers, in effect the first astronomers. Of course, once lenses were invented, and then telescopes, things got better and easier. But NOW COMES THIS STORY about a 5000 year old tablet that is helping modern astronomers with a clue on the unevenness of the Earth’s magnetic field (and here I thought that field had been plowed so often that it was quite smooth and even; but now I sit corrected.)
Of course, all these astronomers, coffee grinders, battery builders and windmillers are not the first to add to Science and Engineering on a January 17th.
1871 San Francisco Andrew S. Hallidie was a mining engineer. At some of the company mines he regularly maintained a continuous bucket system, where a steam engine drove a cable that carried ore buckets in an endless loop out from a mine. Breaks in the cable could shut things down and be dangerous, and the cables showed metal fatigue from passing through the various pulleys. Hallidie experimented with different wire ropes and finally hit on using steel wire (in place of iron) to make
six-strand “ropes” that proved far more durable. He had a further idea, and braided 19 of these 6-stranders into a king-sized, brawny cable. He designed machinery to go along with it and this day received a patent for a cable car system. In 1873 he demonstrated it for the city of San Francisco as a form of public transport. (Cable car systems dated from the 1830s in England (Philadelphia had one in the 1840s) but these relied on naval ropes that quickly wore out. Those systems were abandoned in favor of midget locomotives.) Hallidie set up his demonstration at the corner of Clay and Kearny Street over a ½ mile route that rose 307 feet in elevation(!) A ‘gripping car’ pulling two or three passenger cars would grip the continuously moving cable. For stops, Hallidie’s inventions would automatically engage wheel brakes while relaxing the grip on the cable. It was a success, the beginning of San Francisco’s cable car system. Hallidie became a millionaire, licensing his patents to other cities around the world.
1928 New York City Anatol Josepho was the son of recent immigrants. In September, 1925 (at age 31) on the sidewalk in front of 1659 Broadway, he set up a light-tight booth with his invention on the inside. He invited passersby to step inside, sit down, run a comb through their hair, and then drop a dime in the slot. Jospeho’s machine inside would then take 8 quick photos, one after the other. The customer would step out and 8 minutes later would receive a strip of 8 photos, finished, done. It was an immediate hit and the dimes rolled in. (Decades later the price had risen to three poses for a quarter, as some of us recall.) On this day Josepho received a patent for his invention of the first fully automated film developing machine. Millionaire Henry Morganthau was a customer and so impressed he bought the rights to the patent……for $1 million! Josepho was a rich
man just ahead of the Depression, but Morganthau knew a good investment when he saw it. Kodak licensed the rights for its operations (so that in the days of cameras, you would take your film to the drugstore and they would mail it off to Kodak for prints, slides or both, in about a week.) High-speed commercial versions of Jospeho’s machine helped make this possible for Kodak. Still later, updated versions of the same mechanism made the drive-through 1-hour “Photobooths” (under various franchised names) a steady business from the late 1950s into the 1980s.
Good News in Arts, Music and Fun
>>>>>>In these wintry days of bleak winter, a lot of people (like yours truly) enjoy a sip of a smooth Irish Cream, that concoction of spiked heavy cream. Ah, to face the dreary chill of an Irish winter…..no wonder they have been sipping this for ages. Um…..well…..maybe not so much. The famous Bailey’s Irish Cream goes all the way back to…….1973. (What the…?) And rather than having a recipe from some ancient monastery involving monks and their Benedictine (this is IRISH Roman Catholic cream after all, isn’t it?), it turns out the core idea for the entire thing came from a Jewish marketeer…...from South Africa. I am dumbfounded, and I need another deep sip, but its ALL WRITTEN UP HERE at the link.
To help you swallow that story, here are some other people and events from January 17ths, pleasing the ear, your love of winter sports and granite, your funny bone and your love for spinach.
1734 Vergnies, France (now Belgium) Birth of Francois-Joseph Gossec, composer. A farmer’s son, his voice got him into a boys’ choir in Antwerp at age 6. Was able to study in Paris and caught on with a wealthy patron as conductor of his private orchestra. Took a leaf from Haydn in Vienna (2 years his junior) and wrote several symphonies and a great deal of other chamber music, bent on the idea of reviving instrumental music by French composers (who, like everyone else at the time, were being overshadowed by Haydn, Mozart and all sorts of other brilliant minds in Vienna.) Gossec succeeded, as well as producing several operas. He was friends with Mozart by letters and when they eventually met Mozart wrote he considered him “a good friend and yet a dry man” who nonetheless composed with charm.
1795 Edinburgh, Scotland It gets good and cold in Scotland (on a global parallel with Hudson Bay after all) and things can get a little boring in winter. On this day, to help pass the time, the Dudingston Curling Society was organized, complete with a set of rules and some polished stones for sliding. (To this day in the sport, Scottish curling stones are considered the best.)
1922 Oak Park Illinois Birth of Betty Marion White (later Ludden), actress. Grew up in Depression Era Los Angeles. Summer after HS graduation she and friend sang a duet for an experimental broadcast called ‘television.’ After World War II she did a few years of radio work, then
caught on as a co-host for a local variety program in LA; after 2 years became sole host. Lots of bit parts, star and director of a one-year series called The Betty White Show (with a regular cast member who was black. Southern stations boycotted her show unless she took him off stage but she said simply, “Live with it” and gave him larger parts.) Lots of game show appearances and panels; married Allen Ludden, TV game show host. Broke through on the Mary Tyler Moore Show (as Sue Ann Nivens) and later The Golden Girls (as Rose). 8 Emmys, 3 Screen Actors Guild awards, a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. Passed away 3 weeks short of her 100th birthday…….
1929 Across American newspapers. Olive Oyl and her relatives have been stock characters in a widely reprinted comic strip (“Thimble Theater”) that has been around for almost 10 years. On this day artist Elzie Segar introduces Olive and the world to a future boyfriend: Popeye, a sailor man…. Olive really liked him, and so did everybody else….so much so that little kids were willing to eat their spinach……
Good News in Society and Politics
>>>>>>>Yes, its better. The US Economy is better. That’s better, better, BETTER! Bidenomics, as seen especially in the Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, is delivering on its promise of building/rebuilding/restructuring the American economy “from the bottom up and from the middle out.” The 1% are grousing, howling or knocking back that 3rd Scotch on their 2nd private jet flying to their 4th yacht but TOO BAD. THIS FINE STORY is one of a growing number of many that is worth reading, worth posting, worth passing along, worth quoting from, over and over again. We can all stand on the bank of our pond of our friends and acquaintances and toss in these pebbles of Good News for their ripple effects. Enough ripples in enough ponds make for choppy water. Enough wave trains of choppy water make for waves that wash ashore further inland, that toss boatloads of pundits, that make naysayers and greed-hounds seasick. So heave and toss and plunk away, Gnusies, and toss your gravel to make some of those newscasters grovel…..
Now while the economy continues to outperform while re-molding in a more equitable direction, the process is quiet, slow-spreading, but significant, so that we need to point it out whenever possible. OTOH there have been social and political moments that have been OBVIOUS or telling, and people note these in their personal memories, even, at times, write them into larger history…..like some of these from prior January 17ths.
1706 Boston, Massachusetts Birth of Benjamin Franklin, inventor, scientist, statesman, author. Youngest in a family of 17 children (!) Started on wisdom early: the custom in his days when a meal was served were long prayers of thanks while everything got cold. As a boy when he was helping his father salt down a keg of fish he asked if they could pray over the whole keg right there in the shed, “as it will save a great deal of time at each meal of fish.” He moved to Philadelphia as a young man after a good education and became a printer (selling his own ‘Poor Richard’s Almanac’ under a pseudonym.) Experimented with the properties of electricity (flying the kite in a storm). Read widely
and corresponded with the leading lights of the age. Helped draft the Declaration of Independence. Was Ambassador to France and patiently worked to bring them into the War on the American side. Wrote a glowing letter of qualifications and recommendation for Baron von Steuben so that Washington would take him on in his army. (He wasn’t a baron, or a general, had never been advisor to the King of Prussia…..but Franklin saw this man had the knack for military training. After von Steuben’s troop training at Valley Forge, the Americans were on an even footing with the Redcoats for the rest of the War.) Was a ladies’ man and a charmer even in his old age. Was in on the debates and discussion for writing the Constitution and when it went public for debate and ratification, a woman in the crowd asked what the delegates had created? “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
1781 Cowpens, border of North and South Carolina British strategy in the Revolutionary War has shifted to the Southern colonies. They captured Savannah in 1779 and Charleston in 1780. Congress appoints Saratoga hero General Horatio Gates to retrieve the situation, but Gates blunders his way through a major defeat at Camden. Congress finally asked Washington to name someone (Duh!) He named Nathaniel Greene, who, on the way south, coaxed Daniel Morgan out of retirement. Sharply outnumbered, Greene nonetheless divided his army, sending half of it with Morgan to the west. British General Cornwallis figured he could detach his cavalry commander with some infantry to run down Morgan, and sent Colonel Tarleton to do so. (In the movie “The Patriot”, the nasty villain Tavington is based on Tarleton.)
Morgan has collected militia to even out the numbers and spends the last night before the battle at one campfire after another, asking the militia to fire just two volleys when ordered, and then they can go home (!) THIS morning Tarleton sends his tired troops at the ranks of militiamen on the front slope of a little ridge. As ordered, the militia deliver “two fires,” inflicting moderate casualties, then march away to their left and over the ridge. Tarleton reads this as retreat/panic and orders a charge. Over the ridge the Redcoats meet Morgan’s core regiments, the regular troops of Delawares and Marylanders, (the best Washington had; he had sent them south with Gates). The Chesapeake men stop the British cold with several rapid volleys, then go in with the bayonet and a charge of their own. Tarleton calls up his cavalry to swing the battle but is mortified a) to find the militia have decided to return by a circling march and are shooting at the backs of the Redcoats, and b) to find out Morgan has cavalry too, led by William Washington (a distant cousin of George.) There was an actual storybook moment when Tarleton and William traded saber thrusts from horseback, but Tarleton breaks off and retreats with 200 men. Morgan lost 12 men killed but his men inflicted casualties of 100 British killed, 300 wounded and took 600 prisoners. A thumping American victory.
1806 Washington, DC In this era children were almost always born at home. President Thomas Jefferson had two of his married children and their husbands living with him in the White House. This day saw the birth of James Madison Randolph, Jefferson’s grandson, who became the first child born in the White House. From that naming, guess who was good friends with who…….
1945 Budapest, Hungary Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg (whose international experience took a major jump in the 4 years he spent attending and graduating from the University of Michigan. Salute from this Buckeye!) has worked tirelessly under very dangerous conditions walleduring the War years here, saving the lives of thousands of Jews the Nazis wanted to kill. He used tricks, extended diplomatic immunity to people and even buildings, made people dual citizens. (He had leverage; a LOT of Swedish iron ore went into the German war machine, and they couldn’t risk a break with Sweden.) Now the Russians have arrived to deal with Nazism in a very direct way and have liberated Budapest. This day Wallenberg disappears. The Russians (who have their own grim history of anti-semitism) consider him an American spy. Murky reports say he was killed soon after, OR taken into the Gulag, OR murdered in a KGB prison, perhaps up to a decade later. (“The enemy of my enemy is my friend”----but he remains an enemy…..) Wallenberg is a Swedish (and global) hero, and the 2nd person ever (after Winston Churchill) to be made an honorary American citizen by Congress.
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So now, friends and neighbors, the Round Up is open for your comments, additions, modifications, snickers, chuckles, and Other Good News items. Your input and clicks and links make this a great place to visit every single day.
PLEASE feel free to skip ahead...Over the Block quote section here
to the comments DOWN BELOW!
The intervening piece is something that I put together over the last few days, and while it touches on and uses history, it is my own take on things of the nation these days. This may be a bit jumbled and I don’t know if it worth anything, but somehow it feels like I needed to say it among and FOR you good folks here at the Round Up. You have been kind enough to indulge me for a couple years on my history fetish, so this seems like a place to put it up.
I’m using this block quote offset so that those who want to get to the comments can just do a fast scroll to the last set of wine glasses and ring up a new TL;DR for their January quota here in 2024.
The 80 year Hop
Arnold Toynbee was a British historian well-noticed in the mid-20th century…..whom I have never read or studied. In the vast reams of stuff Toynbee wrote (a multi-volume review of the history of various civilizations, e.g) he observed regarding the great wars of time:
“When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.” It takes 80 years, he argued, for what (historian) Daniel Quinn called a “great forgetting” to happen, forcing a society or nation to learn its lessons all over again.----from Wikipedia
Good News poster, presenter and gentleman Andrew Cockburn last week at the History Corner seized on a reference I made to Toynbee and ran with it. He pointed out in his comment that applying this 80 year observation to American history at 1780, 1860, 1940 and now 2020 (so right up to the Biden Administration!) provides a sobering pattern of hard times. I looked it up and add to Andrew and summarize the following:
In 1780, the Revolution was still on, but at a stalemate. France was in the Revolutionary War on the American side, and the British had withdrawn from the colonial capital of Philadelphia, but to oust them from New York would require a navy. The Americans did not have one, and the French ones were busy elsewhere.
In 1860 the country was cracking up. A bitter election had resulted in the election of Lincoln, and the Southern hotheads (the “Fire Eaters”) had vowed they would not abide this. Secession was happening, arsenals were being seized, a nascent counter-government was being set up in Montgomery, Alabama (later to relocate to Richmond) and a new, major War was at hand.
In 1940 a massive economic disaster had been followed by a massive re-imagining and re-structuring of the national government. Things were better; jobs were out there again, wages were flowing, and desperation was ebbing. But the news from abroad was bad: a major war in Europe (and the “good guys” seemed to be losing (Poland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Holland, Belgium, France) or maybe just holding their own (England.) Across the Pacific was more bad news: invasions, occupations and forced labor by a new, industrialized power (in Manchuria, Indo-China, Burma, endless little islands…..not unlike that string of cold ones stretching from the Alaska Territory called the Aleutians, or that cluster of warm ones called the Hawaiian Territory.) There were defense contracts everywhere, but did we want to get caught up in all that? 20-some years before in the trenches of France was still haunting and had left people wary.
And now, in 2020, there had/has been a once great political party seized and run into the ground by brutal, even violent actors. Public officials were being threatened for doing their jobs. Minorities and women were being targeted by self-righteous, self-justifying loudmouths calling for more wealth to be sucked from the many to be given to the few. Ignorance strutted proudly, damning knowledge and science in the face of a global epidemic that was killing thousands every week.
I have to admit Toynbee & Cockburn seem to be onto something. Sobering stuff indeed, and at a regular interval. But as of today, we are 4 years past that marker. Does history offer clues for now?
In 1784, things were still ragged. Yes, President Mifflin had signed the Peace Treaty to end the Revolution. The Articles of Confederation were functioning, but the President (1 year terms—-elected by Congress) had real authority only in wartime. Each state (states’ rights!) had their own currency that was more readily accepted among locals, and also their own tariffs, port duties and “well-regulated militia” (since the central government could not be trusted with a standing army.) Congress did not have power to tax or borrow; their funding was by making requests to state legislatures, which might get around to making a donation when it suited them, in whatever amount they preferred.
Similarly, in 1864, things were likewise ragged. Emancipation had been proclaimed but the claim was still being disputed with armed might that had killed and wounded thousands. Grant was stalled by Lee in front of Richmond. Sherman was stalled by Johnston/Hood in front of Atlanta. OTOH the South could not force the Unionists to make peace and leave them alone with their slaves. Mechanized farming was feeding Northern troops, civilians and exports, but this was also heralding a massive change in farm life that meant it would never be the same. The Democratic Party nominated a general for the presidency (McClellan) on a platform conceding the war was failure and that negotiations should settle things rather than more fighting. (And then Sherman took Atlanta…..)
In 1944, Pearl Harbor is steadily being avenged, and a massive invasion, 2 years in the planning, has put armies ashore in Normandy and supplied them well enough to free most of France and Belgium and Holland from occupation. Yet in America shoes are still rationed to one pair/year. There are meat shortages and gasoline rationing. All this mobilizing and marching and supplying and building has not won the war and in December the Allies were hit by the first German Winter Offensive since Frederick the Great…..
We are here in 2024, 4 years after the ballot box defeat of tyranny and the further mastering of tyranny’s insurrection. Thousands of American died before their time due to a pandemic that was clumsily faced. There are “in process” legal proceedings against the insurrectionists, “in process” plans by the RW to overturn the country (see Project 2025), “in process” revitalizing of the economy that often does not feel like “Re-much of anything”. The prospect looms of a replay from 2020 of Presidential candidates from the 2 major parties (only done once before in US history: 1952 & 1956 the contest both times was Eisenhower v. Stevenson).
Well, we know what we have to do here in 2024, and brace ourselves for the strain and struggle. But maybe…..just maybe…...the strain and the struggle will visibly, hopefully, uplifting-ly break through to “the sunlit upper lands.”
After all, in 1788, (another 4 years later) there was a new Constitution ratified (by only ¾, no unanimity required) with a functioning Treasury, a popular national leader, and visible, widespread economic gains.
In 1868 the soldiers had come home to a building boom, mass transportation was spreading everywhere on steel rails, and the 13th and 14th Amendments (the first Amendments in over 60 years) heralded a re-ordering of political realities. (That did not work out as hoped…...but this was unknown in 1868.)
In 1948 the soldiers, sailors and fliers had come home, been showered with government aid for further education and for homeownership. Large numbers of women and swaths of minorities were resisting returning to past roles and striking out in new directions. The economy had converted to civilian production as rationing ends. Everyone was busy because Europe under the Marshall Plan needed not only (American) food but also capital and products to rebuild. Isolationism died and a new level of global engagement dawned, via both the United Nations and the Cold War.
All of which suggests to me that 2028 may show forth a major, visible raft of changes (Medicare for All? A Wealth tax on the 1%? Abortion protections? Narrowing of economic inequality via rising incomes for the non-1%? EV sales overtaking gasoline power? Expansion of the Supreme Court? Roll backs of Citizens United and corporate power at large?)
Thank you for indulging me in this compilation. I may be wrong, or way off base, or simply deluded (wouldn’t be the first time.) Toynbee may not be right. But still, for 2024 and 2028...here’s hoping!
May all your News be Good, comforting and inspiring.
Shalom.