Tuesday, September 15, 2020

The Man or Woman In the Arena

      Teddy Roosevelt was a man of 19th ideals. They hunted, they fished and thought nothing of making trophies out of their conquests. Teddy also collected nature. "His lifelong passion for the natural world set the stage for America’s wildlife conservation movement and  determined his legacy as a founding father of today’s museum naturalism."

     Teddy was also a Trustbuster. We don't even know the term anymore and nobody claims the mantle which TR established. Today's Trusts or companies with monopoly power include

Amazon, FaceBook, Google, Microsoft, Comcast, National Football League to name a few.


 


     On April 23, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt gave what would become one of the most widely quoted speeches of his career. I read this in high school and copied it to a piece of paper so I could carry it around for inspiration. I later traded it for sources of inspiration which I instead committed to memory, especially poets like Yeats,  and Keats.


"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

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