This is STILL the American Century.....

"We Americans are unhappy. We are not happy about America. We are not happy about ourselves in relation to America. We are nervous — or gloomy — or apathetic.... As we look towards the future — our own future and the future of other nations — we are filled with foreboding.... [We] have miserably failed to solve the problems of our epoch.... Nowhere in the world have man’s failures been so little excusable as in the United States of America. Nowhere has the contrast been so great between the reasonable hopes of our age and the actual facts of failure and frustration. And so now all our failures and mistakes hover like birds of ill omen....

Consider the 20th Century. It is ours not only in the sense that we happen to live in it, but ours also because it is America’s.... No other century has been so big with promise for human progress and happiness.... There is the belief — shared let us remember by most men living — that the 20th Century must be to a significant degree an American Century....

We have some things in this country which are infinitely precious and especially American — a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence.... We are [also] the inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization — above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of Charity.... [This century] is now our time to be the powerhouse from which these ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.

[I envision] America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skillful servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of freedom and justice — out of these elements surely can be fashioned a vision of the 20th century to which we can and will devote ourselves....

It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century."

Source: Life Magazine Editor, Henry Luce, "The American Century" (February 1941)


In the final analysis, your attitude determines your effectiveness in everything, every time! LGL

I am what I am.....

The Scorpion and the Frog is a fable of unknown author, though often mis-attributed to Aesop.[1] The story is about a scorpion asking a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion reassures him that if it stung the frog, the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown as well. The frog then agrees; nevertheless, in mid-river, the scorpion stings him, dooming the two of them. When asked why, the scorpion explains, "I'm a scorpion; it's my nature."

Common variations include a turtle, fox, or farmer in place of the frog, or a snake in place of the scorpion.

It is often quoted to illustrate the purportedly insuppressible nature of one's self at its base level.

In the final analysis, your attitude determines your effectiveness in everything, every time! LGL