Tuesday was a bad day. It was hard being a teacher on Tuesday. At the end of that day I remembered a poster a friend had on the wall of her living room. It is a print of a poster that was put up around London during the time of the blitz. I printed out a copy and put it on my classroom wall.
I am a repressed Anglo-Saxon. I don't much like displays of affection. I think emotional repression is undervalued in the current age. I blame America. You didn't see British soldiers blubbing to each other in World War II films. Stiffen that upper lip chaps.
I played one of Winston Churchill's speeches to my Year 13 history class today. They found it hard to get past his voice; that sort of slurred, jowly, "is he drunk?" sound he had, but they listened when I told them to, and at the end I told them how important those speeches had been. I told them about people throughout the British Empire listening to that rising, resonant voice that lifted out of its slumber sometimes and gave people hope. There is no forgetting that the world confronted a terrible evil and that the British Empire seemed all but finished in 1940 when Winston stood in the House and delievered his maiden speech as Prime Minister.
"You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, "come then, let us go forward together with our united strength."
Very little in life is inspiring, and when "heroes" are investigated they are found to flawed and human, but let's take something from a few moving words in a time of dread.
Do we stand for something? Will we resist?
3 comments:
Yes we will resist and with time we will see Victory.
Today we see Labour coming back to within a 6 point difference to the dread.
Every day at Nuova Lazio High has the ingredients to be a bad day.
We must fight them in the classrooms, we must fight them behing the auditorium, we must fight them at the front gate, we must fight them at student services; but we must never surrender!
On a more serious historical note ...
Today I was reading an autobiography of an Irish born fellow who found himself in the English army and was taken prisoner of war in France in the early stages of WW2. He recounts how his belongings were often stolen by fellow POW's; how Oficers looked after their own interests .
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