be drifting towards
catastrophe, everybody …
wishes to stop it
In a House of Commons debate over the news from the Spanish Civil War titled, The Situation at Bilbao on April 14, 1937, The Hon. Winston Churchill, said:
We seem to be moving, drifting, steadily against our will, against the will of every race and every people and every class, towards some hideous catastrophe.
Everybody wishes to stop it, but they do not know how.
Worry has been defined by some nerve specialists as “a spasm of the imagination.”
The mind, it is said, seizes hold of something and simply cannot let it go.
Reason, argument, threats are useless.
The grip becomes all the more convulsive.
But if you could introduce some new theme, in this case the practical effect of a common purpose and of co-operation for a common end, if you could introduce that, then indeed it might be that these clenched fists would relax into open hands of generous co-operation, that the reign of peace and freedom might come, and that science, instead of being a shameful prisoner in the galleys of slaughter, might pour her wealth abounding into the cottage homes of every land.
Everybody wishes to stop it, but they do not know how.
Reason, argument, threats are useless.
The grip … becomes all the more convulsive.
This was 2 years before the start of World War 2 for Great Britain.
4 years before the United States would get involved.
And 8 years until the war in Europe would be over.
We seem to be moving, drifting, steadily against our will, against the will of every race and every people and every class, towards some hideous catastrophe.
No Haiku For You 