All We Need is Courage, Faith, Hope

Here's a small article from by-gone days that may hold resonance today

This small article was published in the Wetaskiwin Times in  1935, in the depths of the Great Depression. Although written in darker days than now, it may have some relevance to today's Alberta.

Courage Faith, Hope

In the times we are now going through, we are apt to revile the weakness of man, that, in such a seemingly prosperous country he should allow such poverty and hunger as many are experiencing. We berate man's lack of judgement in not saving for a "rainy day", not planning ahead that he might not be caught unawares by depressions. We also criticize the lack of business sense of many men.

But rarely do most of us have a word of praise for the "man in the street", for the businessman, for the banker, for all those who are grimly watching the ruins at their feet, the work of a lifetime crumbling, everything lost.

Everything lost? Not courage, not faith, not hope - those three.

For in the dark days there burns in these men and women the courage of a race youthful and strong; in their hearts is faith, faith in themselves and belief in their country; in their breasts hope beats - not futile hope - but hope builded on the knowledge that man is strong, that out of the darkest ruins he can build again, greater and finer than those structures now fallen.

Covered wagons creak and careen across the prairie...and a nation is born. Windjammers like toy ships beat their way around the cape, and a nation's maritime commerce is inaugurated...

Today, men and women with these three things alone are hanging on, hiding their misery, eating what they can eat, working when they can work, but above all with nothing they have everything - courage, faith and hope. With these three things, they will build again and some day smile at the memory of the lean days just as the earlier pioneers now recollect the hot suns, the stormy seas - glad they carried on through it all.

(Wetaskiwin Times, August 10, 1935, reprinting from the Seattle (Washington) Journal of Commerce))