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alexplaster.bsky.social
alex plaster
@alexplaster.bsky.social
84 followers 440 following 61 posts
"wherever there is a human being there is an opportunity for kindness" - seneca
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sethcotlar.bsky.social
Oh dear, how awkward...the guy who coined the term "American Dream" gave the last word of his book to a young immigrant girl & said the main lesson of his day was that people who'd amassed great wealth were not "the wisest leader to follow nor the best fitted to propound a sane philosophy of life."
416 THE EPIC OF AMERICA The prospect is discouraging to-day, but not hopeless. As we compare America in 1931 with the America of 1912 it seems as though we had slipped a long way backwards. But that period is short, after all, and the whole world has been going through the fires of Hell. There are not a few signs of promise now in the sky, signs that the peoples themselves are beginning once again to crave something more than is vouchsafed to them in the toils and toys of the mass-production age. They are beginning to realize that, because a man is born with a particular knack for gathering in vast aggregates of money and power for himself, he may not on that account be the wisest leader to follow nor the best fitted to propound a sane philosophy of life. We have a long and arduous road to travel if we are to realize our American dream in the life of our nation, but if we fail, there is nothing left but the old eternal round. The alternative is the failure of self-government, the failure of the common man to rise to full stature, the failure of all that the American dream has held of hope and promise for mankind. That dream was not the product of a solitary thinker. It evolved from the hearts and burdened souls of many millions, who have come to us from all nations. If some of them appear to us to have too great faith, we know not yet to what faith may attain, and may hearken to the words of one of them, Mary Antin, a young immigrant girl. who came to us from Russia, a child out of "the Middle Ages," as she says, into our twentieth century. Sitting on the steps of the Boston Public Library, where the treasures of the whole of human thought had been opened to her, she wrote, "This is my latest home, and it invites me to a glad new life. The endless ages have indeed throbbed through my blood, but a new rhythm dances in my veins. My spirit is not tied to the monumental past, any more than my feet were bound to my grandfather's house below the hill. The past was only my… EPILOGUE 417 splendid palace, whose shadow covers acres. No! It is not I that belong to the past, but the past that belongs to me. America is the youngest of the nations, and inherits all that went before in history. And I am the youngest of America's children, and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage, to the last white star espied through the telescope, to the last great thought of the philosopher. Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future."
December 25, 2025 at 12:22 AM
alexplaster.bsky.social
Hill over Woody and Godwin?
December 24, 2025 at 1:28 AM
alexplaster.bsky.social
he’s gonna be so good for the raiders next year
December 21, 2025 at 3:53 AM