Washington, and a Little Weather

First the weather, chilly, overcast, raw, with incongruous great explosions of yellow, mauve, and other colors as the trees and bushes start to bloom. A perfect metaphor for my mood lately: bleak, but aware of blessings I should count. Could be worse.

But you find inspiration not only in places you don't expect, but in places where inspiration is so commonly sought that it's a cliché. I'm talking about a book about George Washington—Washington's Crossing, to be precise, by David Hackett Fischer. The man strove all his life to do things well, to be disciplined, to be fair and treat people properly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about the slavery. I attribute that to peer pressure—all his friends had slaves, after all. I'd bet lots of people would like having slaves if they just tried it once. And for another thing, there are lots and lots of slaves today. Anybody who's all sniffy about George Washington might want to consider getting at least equally sniffy on behalf of people who are slaves right now. 

But I digress. Washington, for all his qualities and accomplishments—he became President of a country that wouldn't have even existed without him in the first place—wasn't a whiz kid for whom everything always went right. The Revolutionary War was mostly disastrous setbacks that came about in part because he'd have poor intelligence and would guess wrong. After the Americans lost New York to the British, Washington was near despair, but he reached down inside himself and found the wherewithal to keep going. He also remembered that not everything was his fault. More than once, his troops would just run away when the British came. From the fifth chapter, "The Fall of New York," of the abovementioned:

Washington and his aides came galloping down from Harlem and arrived as the Connecticut militia were running for their lives, their officers among them. Washington was enraged. He "three times dashed his hat on the ground," and shouted, "Good God, have I got such troops as those!" Weedon wrote that "the general was so exasperated that he struck several officers in their flight. ... It was with difficulty his friends could get him to quit the field, so great was [sic] his emotions."

I don't know what sort of person is offered as an inspiring example to kids today. Probably not individuals at all, more like people working cooperatively in groups to accomplish things. But even when George was one of the dead white males we were encouraged to admire, they didn't focus on his bad days, or tell us that we'd have bad days too. All right, they did talk about the winter at Valley Forge, especially since we lived right near Valley Forge. But that was presented as a group misfortune, with everyone huddled around fires together. The teachers never told us that Washington's own compatriots would, at times, drive him nuts. The dude on the dollar bill, blowing his stack and throwing his hat on the ground! Just wonderful. I don't know if I actually love George Washington, but if I did, it would be for that.