My husband recently lost his job so I’m working extra hard to try to make up for his (considerable) lost income. Therefore I don’t have the time, energy, or frankly personal space, for the kind of deep thinking I had been accustomed to doing. So this was a great read. Thank you.
As JFK once said at a dinner of Nobel Laureates, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
Mr Jefferson was one of the greatest minds of the age.
Holly, de Tocqueville Democracy in America. If you promise to read it I’ll send extra $ for it. The best description of why the USA was such a beacon for the rest of the world for so long and also shows how far the drift has gone.
Good luck with your project. One day you will have to read Caro on LBJ, the greatest political biography of the 20th century but now is not that time
Despite your tongue in cheek comment, actually I doubt the original early 19th century French would read much more clearly. I'd prefer a much more liberal, rather than literal translation. In fact I highlighted a number of passages that I thought I'd turn into more contemporary prose. It's all public domain, so I can do whatever I want with it, right? ;)
Can't speak for French, but I find original 19th century Grimm's fairytales no harder to understand than modern German. They have the advantage of retaining the a slightly old-world voice that gets censored out of English-language versions of the stories.
Thank you, for doing this! I've been pretty aware since 1968, but most people don't give a flip about government and it's sad because it's what protects our freedom to do everything else in our lives! I think people are becoming hungry for this information!!! You done good, Holly!!! It's going to grow exponentially!!! ❤️
"...makes me think that the Founders would surely be horrified by the state of American freedom today..."
reminds me of the meme where there's a portrait of Washington with the caption, "me and my homies woulda been stacking bodies by now."
In addition to being funny it speaks to your analysis, that these guys were clear and decisive and none of what they were saying was up for debate. It's why a couple years ago I came to the conclusion that "the marketplace of ideas" is not really a thing.
As Jesse Kelly bluntly put it when talking to Michael Malice once, the reason we're free is because we shot a a bunch of British people in the face. The point is not the violence but the fact that the rubber must eventually hit the road--i.e., action. In fact I believe that many if not most conservatives and libertarians mythologize the founding of the country to a point that they forget what the point was.
E.g. the idea of national divorce. I don't advocate for either position but it's insane how freedom people get triggered at the mere IDEA. The idea that the founders they mythologize fucking ran on. *Very* few people can handle cognitive dissonance, it turns out.
In my family, libertarians just watch and let the chips fall where they may. The liberal parent takes the lead and the kids grow up to have substance abuse and other problems, some pretty serious. Conservatives know that minding one's own business actually has two sides. Liberals want everyone's business to be theirs, and libertarians, for what I see with my eyes, want to let the country get snatched up from under their noses. The other odd thing I notice is that all three groups have one domain about which they engage in magical thinking.
yup, this is why I'm indie and don't label myself. Everyone has their magical thinking/blind spots. My Overton window is big. I'm willing to entertain any idea. No one has it right anyway.
I'm not so sure that the people there would have objected to latter-day abuses, let alone taken up arms against them
Remember this is a document that they wrote only AFTER they had decided on armed rebellion. That decision to decades to work up to, and even then the only people signing the declaration were the armed-rebellion faction.
P.S.. can you expand on what you mean about "the marketplace of ideas". I tend to agree that it's not a great metaphor, but I don't really know what you mean.
The marketplace of ideas is the notion that the way we arrive at the best results for society is by open, honest discussion and vigorous debate. Everyone gets a seat at the table, and may the best ideas win! Maybe it works on a micro scale but macro society? Never happened.
A couple things, one of which I brought up a week or three ago.
I have a strong suspicion that Jefferson did not intend the world "pursuit" to be used as a verb, but rather a noun: happiness as a pursuit, much as mathematics or engineering or medicine.
I have thought about "...than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." for a number of years. I'd assert it is a warning as well, sort of a follow-up to the idea that we shouldn't change forms for light and transient causes. "Just because we're going to undertake this doesn't mean we're going to make something any better than what we already have."
Jefferson was indeed a Deist, but I am pretty sure he was a regular church-goer, believing that he should stay in touch with the ideas common to colonial America, and Christianity was certainly the common thing.
We look back on Jefferson as a sober, perhaps even stoic, man. Maybe as he got older, but when he was Washington's SecState, he and Washington argued bitterly over things, to the point that Jefferson tendered his resignation to Washington. As much as they were in disagreement, Washington found Jefferson's views invaluable and convinced him to stay on. We shouldn't be so surprised by the contention - 2 red-headed, exceptionally intelligent, total alpha males butting heads. This speaks well of the character of both men.
This is phenomenal! I became a paid subscriber when I read what you are doing.
A thought on happiness... I find it really interesting that the founders framed it as the “pursuit of happiness”, firm in the knowledge that it’s something we all strive for, not necessarily a destination. And that it’s pursuit is one of our inalienable rights. Just mind blowing...
I wish I had read this two weeks ago. I am on a local school board and we were recently asked to vote on a “call to action” for youth. The definition of youth in this case was expanded to include ages 18-25 (!?!) Safety concerns are rampant throughout the document and one the *aspirations* in the document is: “young people have opportunities to...be responsible risk takers who have the support of the community to catch them if they fall”
One quote from the Declaration of Independence would have exposed that document for what it truly is.
The pursuit of happiness is a key phrase. Jefferson and the other founders were keen followers of John Locke, and his formulation was, "Life, liberty, and property." Property was a problematical term for Jefferson because slaves were property to their owners. Clearly he didn't want to condone slavery. Yes, I know he was a slave owner himself, but he thought slavery would eventually die out.
It's interesting to study the two great revolutions of the late 18th century. The American and the French. Why did the former last and the latter quickly devolve to tyranny? Edmund Burke had his ideas, as did de Tocqueville. The revolutions were less than 20 years apart and clearly inextricably linked despite how different they were.
It boils down to you were British and they were French. They could only look back to Rousseau; we could look back to Athelstan. Their parlements withered centuries before; our shared parliamentry tradition stood five hundred-odd years; unbroken but evolved. L'Etat, c'est Moi hadn't been an English thing since Runnymede.
Good point. Burke's main point was that the French revolutionaries wanted to remake society (in a way that anticipated Marx). The American revolutionaries wanted to bring back the freedom they had lived with for almost 200 years in the colonies.
The French "elite" were so obsessed with the decimal system that changing the measurement system wasn't enough. They even tried to remake the calendar into 10 days in a week. Basically they wanted to do away with everything and start from scratch with their much more logical and scientific methods. Sounds all too familiar.
Not to mention that the language of today's political left ignores inalienable rights and implies that rights are granted by government, a very French Rev notion
> Property was a problematical term for Jefferson because slaves were property to their owners. Clearly he didn't want to condone slavery.
Thanks for that insight. When I learned about this, it was from a documentary that left the slavery connection out and (at least in my mind) suggested some quasi-socialistic qualms about property.
It makes more sense that the Founders couldn't be full throated about fundamental rights because they choked on their original sin of slavery.
>Yes, I know he was a slave owner himself, but he thought slavery would eventually die out.
It would have been good if he'd followed through on this. We know that southern elites grew more, not less, intransigent about slavery as the tide turned against them. Jefferson, as president, took their side. In this way he betrayed his professed principles and so doing nurtured the seeds of civil war.
Glenn Beck claims to have an original draft w some of T. Jefferson's notes that called for the abolition of slavery. It was political jostling not to include it.
America in 1776: "Give Me Liberty, Or Give Me Death!"
America in 2020: "Thank you, Sir. May I have another?"
Just one comment about the pursuit of happiness. I don't have a contemporaneous dictionary to recommend, but it is my understanding that at that time, "pursuit of happiness" meant the pursuit of an economic occupation, in other words, the right to make a living - kind of like your substack.
I understand you are doing this for preciously this reason but its very surreal to see you come to the same conclusions regarding many of the statements in the declaration that I was pretty much born into with how my own family explained US history to be when I was younger, and I will not deny up until recently I had assumed almost all Americans, even those I politically were against, believed. These last few years have been very eye opening, and in all honesty I would have thought that your upbringing among the religious right would have seen them at least reference these kind of documents yet they seem to have just acknowledged their existence with out actually looking at any of the text.
The idea especially that people are in possession of Natural Rights, that cannot be given by a government nor taken by one, they exist at all times and with all peoples is a powerful one. I remember watching a video in which someone made an argument that the French Revolution was more impactful than the American one due to the hypocrisy of keeping slavery and other such factors as well as its direct impact on Democracy in Europe but they also made the point of saying that the French Revolution "gave these rights" to the French People, and my only response was "yes and they then took many of those rights away from the thousands they executed on trumped up charges and to unleash a terror that directly lead the people to backing a monarchy". It also flows directly into the ideals of both the 1st and 2nd Amendments, you absolutely at all times have the right to speak your mind as you see fit and you also have the right, natural and inalienable, to defend yourself with a, to use a modern parlance, "weapon of war" as that was indeed the actual intent when looking at how these rights were alluded too in the Declaration. I do also highly recommend the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers as these two sets of documents would show how almost immediately after the Revolution there was still a great deal of debate and argument amongst the founders on how the USA was actually to be run and organized. The Anti-Federalists directly lead to the enumerated rights within the original Bill of Rights specifically to ensure government would be forbidden from having power over, and thus the power to curtail, certain things such as speech and self defense
A lot of people think that "Christian education" is automatically high-quality, intellectually rigorous, etc., like a good school run by Jesuit priests or something. Many, perhaps most, of the schools in the American South run by fundamentalist Protestants are a joke with regard to education. Moms with high school diplomas who aren't putting in the work that good homeschool moms do are the teachers. The book of Genesis is science class. "Libs and commies bad, founding fathers good, all the founders believed in the KJV 1611 just like us and do NOT ask questions" is everything else.
Well at least given your previous explanations of your childhood I don't think anyone here would think it was high quality but I at least assumed they would try to steel man their own arguments in regards to American history and the like, my own Conservative leaning family did so even if now I know there were many things they glossed over in the details the idea of not even reading things like the Declaration or having an understanding of the Founding Father's mindset is just bizarre to me. The emphasis on claiming they followed the "exact" same Christian denomination though does seem like it would quickly lend itself towards not explaining anything lest that argument fall apart incredibly rapidly, I can only imagine how some would react to reading, or even hearing about, the Jefferson Bible which excised great swaths of the gospels to try and pare down the story of the new testament to purely the moral and philosophical arguments made by Chirst/Early Christians, completely removing almost all supernatural elements and even many references to Divinity in general.
OK, here's my response having just reread the Declaration, and not (yet) your post.
The thing holds up well. Better than I remember from the last time I read it over a decade ago. I'm a non-American Anglophile, and I used like only the highfalutin' preamble with it's unalienable Rights etc. I thought the actual list of grievances was a bit whiny and parochial.
Not anymore. I can't judge how historically accurate the grievances are, but taken in their own terms they are certainly fine things to get rebellious over. In particular I'm impressed about how procedural and constitutional they are. E.g.
> He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, ...
Or
> He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices
Or
> For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
Basically the claim is that as British subjects, they were entitled to a system of impartial laws and machinery for fairly administering them. They contend that the King has undermined this system, and thus pissed away his (and Britain's) right to govern.
I totally agree. I used to skip the list of grievances as contemporary to the founders but not relevant to me. Now I find it very relevant and important.
Wow, what you’re writing, exploring, helping us remember is needed now. It’s easy to think it’s over or at least ending, this type of thought gives hope and encouragement. Thank you.
This is wonderful; I can’t wait to read more.
My husband recently lost his job so I’m working extra hard to try to make up for his (considerable) lost income. Therefore I don’t have the time, energy, or frankly personal space, for the kind of deep thinking I had been accustomed to doing. So this was a great read. Thank you.
Thank YOU! And do email me if you need to go on the comp list. I'm happy to help if needed.
I’m already on it, thank you!!!
As someone going through some stuff this was also a welcome great read and break from the heavy-osity.
As JFK once said at a dinner of Nobel Laureates, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
Mr Jefferson was one of the greatest minds of the age.
OMG that's a great story.
Holly, de Tocqueville Democracy in America. If you promise to read it I’ll send extra $ for it. The best description of why the USA was such a beacon for the rest of the world for so long and also shows how far the drift has gone.
Good luck with your project. One day you will have to read Caro on LBJ, the greatest political biography of the 20th century but now is not that time
I will definitely read it! I already have a list of books to buy next month. 😆
Can you publish this list, perhaps as a pinned post?
Choose the version carefully. I read one based on the original 1840 translation, and, despite all the great insights, it was a slog.
Sounds like the Wholly Wibble; something you want to read in the original. Traduttore Traditore.
Despite your tongue in cheek comment, actually I doubt the original early 19th century French would read much more clearly. I'd prefer a much more liberal, rather than literal translation. In fact I highlighted a number of passages that I thought I'd turn into more contemporary prose. It's all public domain, so I can do whatever I want with it, right? ;)
Can't speak for French, but I find original 19th century Grimm's fairytales no harder to understand than modern German. They have the advantage of retaining the a slightly old-world voice that gets censored out of English-language versions of the stories.
The 19th century was not that long ago.
Caro sounds crucial; LBJ, the American Gracchi?
Thank you, for doing this! I've been pretty aware since 1968, but most people don't give a flip about government and it's sad because it's what protects our freedom to do everything else in our lives! I think people are becoming hungry for this information!!! You done good, Holly!!! It's going to grow exponentially!!! ❤️
I'm having a lot of fun with this. I hope people will read along with me and enjoy it. 🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻
Certainly going to pass it on to everyone I know including my, soon to be 15-year-old, grandson!
Still reading but this passage:
"...makes me think that the Founders would surely be horrified by the state of American freedom today..."
reminds me of the meme where there's a portrait of Washington with the caption, "me and my homies woulda been stacking bodies by now."
In addition to being funny it speaks to your analysis, that these guys were clear and decisive and none of what they were saying was up for debate. It's why a couple years ago I came to the conclusion that "the marketplace of ideas" is not really a thing.
As Jesse Kelly bluntly put it when talking to Michael Malice once, the reason we're free is because we shot a a bunch of British people in the face. The point is not the violence but the fact that the rubber must eventually hit the road--i.e., action. In fact I believe that many if not most conservatives and libertarians mythologize the founding of the country to a point that they forget what the point was.
E.g. the idea of national divorce. I don't advocate for either position but it's insane how freedom people get triggered at the mere IDEA. The idea that the founders they mythologize fucking ran on. *Very* few people can handle cognitive dissonance, it turns out.
In my family, libertarians just watch and let the chips fall where they may. The liberal parent takes the lead and the kids grow up to have substance abuse and other problems, some pretty serious. Conservatives know that minding one's own business actually has two sides. Liberals want everyone's business to be theirs, and libertarians, for what I see with my eyes, want to let the country get snatched up from under their noses. The other odd thing I notice is that all three groups have one domain about which they engage in magical thinking.
yup, this is why I'm indie and don't label myself. Everyone has their magical thinking/blind spots. My Overton window is big. I'm willing to entertain any idea. No one has it right anyway.
I'm not so sure that the people there would have objected to latter-day abuses, let alone taken up arms against them
Remember this is a document that they wrote only AFTER they had decided on armed rebellion. That decision to decades to work up to, and even then the only people signing the declaration were the armed-rebellion faction.
Also the process of white-anting thse constitution began with the founding generation. The Sedition Act is probably the most egregious case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts#Sedition_Act) outside of original sins like slavery.
P.S.. can you expand on what you mean about "the marketplace of ideas". I tend to agree that it's not a great metaphor, but I don't really know what you mean.
The marketplace of ideas is the notion that the way we arrive at the best results for society is by open, honest discussion and vigorous debate. Everyone gets a seat at the table, and may the best ideas win! Maybe it works on a micro scale but macro society? Never happened.
I’m thrilled you’re doing this! It’s a review for me, but your writing is refreshing and encouraging. I needed both right now. Thank you.
A couple things, one of which I brought up a week or three ago.
I have a strong suspicion that Jefferson did not intend the world "pursuit" to be used as a verb, but rather a noun: happiness as a pursuit, much as mathematics or engineering or medicine.
I have thought about "...than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." for a number of years. I'd assert it is a warning as well, sort of a follow-up to the idea that we shouldn't change forms for light and transient causes. "Just because we're going to undertake this doesn't mean we're going to make something any better than what we already have."
Jefferson was indeed a Deist, but I am pretty sure he was a regular church-goer, believing that he should stay in touch with the ideas common to colonial America, and Christianity was certainly the common thing.
We look back on Jefferson as a sober, perhaps even stoic, man. Maybe as he got older, but when he was Washington's SecState, he and Washington argued bitterly over things, to the point that Jefferson tendered his resignation to Washington. As much as they were in disagreement, Washington found Jefferson's views invaluable and convinced him to stay on. We shouldn't be so surprised by the contention - 2 red-headed, exceptionally intelligent, total alpha males butting heads. This speaks well of the character of both men.
This is phenomenal! I became a paid subscriber when I read what you are doing.
A thought on happiness... I find it really interesting that the founders framed it as the “pursuit of happiness”, firm in the knowledge that it’s something we all strive for, not necessarily a destination. And that it’s pursuit is one of our inalienable rights. Just mind blowing...
I wish I had read this two weeks ago. I am on a local school board and we were recently asked to vote on a “call to action” for youth. The definition of youth in this case was expanded to include ages 18-25 (!?!) Safety concerns are rampant throughout the document and one the *aspirations* in the document is: “young people have opportunities to...be responsible risk takers who have the support of the community to catch them if they fall”
One quote from the Declaration of Independence would have exposed that document for what it truly is.
Thank you
The pursuit of happiness is a key phrase. Jefferson and the other founders were keen followers of John Locke, and his formulation was, "Life, liberty, and property." Property was a problematical term for Jefferson because slaves were property to their owners. Clearly he didn't want to condone slavery. Yes, I know he was a slave owner himself, but he thought slavery would eventually die out.
It's interesting to study the two great revolutions of the late 18th century. The American and the French. Why did the former last and the latter quickly devolve to tyranny? Edmund Burke had his ideas, as did de Tocqueville. The revolutions were less than 20 years apart and clearly inextricably linked despite how different they were.
It boils down to you were British and they were French. They could only look back to Rousseau; we could look back to Athelstan. Their parlements withered centuries before; our shared parliamentry tradition stood five hundred-odd years; unbroken but evolved. L'Etat, c'est Moi hadn't been an English thing since Runnymede.
Good point. Burke's main point was that the French revolutionaries wanted to remake society (in a way that anticipated Marx). The American revolutionaries wanted to bring back the freedom they had lived with for almost 200 years in the colonies.
The French "elite" were so obsessed with the decimal system that changing the measurement system wasn't enough. They even tried to remake the calendar into 10 days in a week. Basically they wanted to do away with everything and start from scratch with their much more logical and scientific methods. Sounds all too familiar.
Not to mention that the language of today's political left ignores inalienable rights and implies that rights are granted by government, a very French Rev notion
> Property was a problematical term for Jefferson because slaves were property to their owners. Clearly he didn't want to condone slavery.
Thanks for that insight. When I learned about this, it was from a documentary that left the slavery connection out and (at least in my mind) suggested some quasi-socialistic qualms about property.
It makes more sense that the Founders couldn't be full throated about fundamental rights because they choked on their original sin of slavery.
>Yes, I know he was a slave owner himself, but he thought slavery would eventually die out.
It would have been good if he'd followed through on this. We know that southern elites grew more, not less, intransigent about slavery as the tide turned against them. Jefferson, as president, took their side. In this way he betrayed his professed principles and so doing nurtured the seeds of civil war.
Glenn Beck claims to have an original draft w some of T. Jefferson's notes that called for the abolition of slavery. It was political jostling not to include it.
Bank when I was on FB, I posted:
America in 1776: "Give Me Liberty, Or Give Me Death!"
America in 2020: "Thank you, Sir. May I have another?"
Just one comment about the pursuit of happiness. I don't have a contemporaneous dictionary to recommend, but it is my understanding that at that time, "pursuit of happiness" meant the pursuit of an economic occupation, in other words, the right to make a living - kind of like your substack.
Great post! Keep going!
Thank you. We should all re-read our founding father’s gifts to us. The simplicity yet elegance in their words is profound. I look forward to part 2!
Mine was great so that proves you are right. I have found yours to be the best advice: choose your translation carefully
Whose translation did you read?
I understand you are doing this for preciously this reason but its very surreal to see you come to the same conclusions regarding many of the statements in the declaration that I was pretty much born into with how my own family explained US history to be when I was younger, and I will not deny up until recently I had assumed almost all Americans, even those I politically were against, believed. These last few years have been very eye opening, and in all honesty I would have thought that your upbringing among the religious right would have seen them at least reference these kind of documents yet they seem to have just acknowledged their existence with out actually looking at any of the text.
The idea especially that people are in possession of Natural Rights, that cannot be given by a government nor taken by one, they exist at all times and with all peoples is a powerful one. I remember watching a video in which someone made an argument that the French Revolution was more impactful than the American one due to the hypocrisy of keeping slavery and other such factors as well as its direct impact on Democracy in Europe but they also made the point of saying that the French Revolution "gave these rights" to the French People, and my only response was "yes and they then took many of those rights away from the thousands they executed on trumped up charges and to unleash a terror that directly lead the people to backing a monarchy". It also flows directly into the ideals of both the 1st and 2nd Amendments, you absolutely at all times have the right to speak your mind as you see fit and you also have the right, natural and inalienable, to defend yourself with a, to use a modern parlance, "weapon of war" as that was indeed the actual intent when looking at how these rights were alluded too in the Declaration. I do also highly recommend the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers as these two sets of documents would show how almost immediately after the Revolution there was still a great deal of debate and argument amongst the founders on how the USA was actually to be run and organized. The Anti-Federalists directly lead to the enumerated rights within the original Bill of Rights specifically to ensure government would be forbidden from having power over, and thus the power to curtail, certain things such as speech and self defense
A lot of people think that "Christian education" is automatically high-quality, intellectually rigorous, etc., like a good school run by Jesuit priests or something. Many, perhaps most, of the schools in the American South run by fundamentalist Protestants are a joke with regard to education. Moms with high school diplomas who aren't putting in the work that good homeschool moms do are the teachers. The book of Genesis is science class. "Libs and commies bad, founding fathers good, all the founders believed in the KJV 1611 just like us and do NOT ask questions" is everything else.
Well at least given your previous explanations of your childhood I don't think anyone here would think it was high quality but I at least assumed they would try to steel man their own arguments in regards to American history and the like, my own Conservative leaning family did so even if now I know there were many things they glossed over in the details the idea of not even reading things like the Declaration or having an understanding of the Founding Father's mindset is just bizarre to me. The emphasis on claiming they followed the "exact" same Christian denomination though does seem like it would quickly lend itself towards not explaining anything lest that argument fall apart incredibly rapidly, I can only imagine how some would react to reading, or even hearing about, the Jefferson Bible which excised great swaths of the gospels to try and pare down the story of the new testament to purely the moral and philosophical arguments made by Chirst/Early Christians, completely removing almost all supernatural elements and even many references to Divinity in general.
Truly fundamentalist Christians can't dare to look too closely into the foundations of American liberty. The two world-views are too far opposed.
There's a similar thing on the atheist left of course. Which is how America got into it's current mess.
OK, here's my response having just reread the Declaration, and not (yet) your post.
The thing holds up well. Better than I remember from the last time I read it over a decade ago. I'm a non-American Anglophile, and I used like only the highfalutin' preamble with it's unalienable Rights etc. I thought the actual list of grievances was a bit whiny and parochial.
Not anymore. I can't judge how historically accurate the grievances are, but taken in their own terms they are certainly fine things to get rebellious over. In particular I'm impressed about how procedural and constitutional they are. E.g.
> He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, ...
Or
> He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices
Or
> For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
Basically the claim is that as British subjects, they were entitled to a system of impartial laws and machinery for fairly administering them. They contend that the King has undermined this system, and thus pissed away his (and Britain's) right to govern.
I totally agree. I used to skip the list of grievances as contemporary to the founders but not relevant to me. Now I find it very relevant and important.
Wow, what you’re writing, exploring, helping us remember is needed now. It’s easy to think it’s over or at least ending, this type of thought gives hope and encouragement. Thank you.