The Prized Treasures

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  “Will the prized treasures of today always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house? . . . .   The “sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and “Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios.” Jerome K. Jerome, “T...

Fear

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In the introduction to his March 4, 1933 Inaugural Address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." While we share “common difficulties . . . our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for.” 


I daily encounter people who are driven by fear. They are “meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.” Marcus Aurelius says people are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. Roosevelt is right: It is unjustified to behave this way and we have more than enough, so what’s the problem? The source of fear must lie in another realm, where we can easily be our own worst enemy. Our task is to show people what is good and what is evil. We have nothing to fear, as “we have still much to be thankful for.”

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