I don’t think “mindless happiness” is the proper response to real problems. Though I thought it clear from the post, “happiness” is a response to very difficult circumstances. Optimism is a survival mechanism. This can be observed in shipwreck situations, long voyages and in societies in wartime. They fantasize about what they’re going to do when everything is over.

There’ll be blue birds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.

There’ll be love and laughter
And peace ever after
Tomorrow, when the world is free.

Of course nobody ever really expected this to literally happen in a rational sense. But in an emotional sense, there was an acknowledged need for a finish line. The Day. VE Day. The Day of Redemption, etc. Obama uses this meme, but in a huckster’s way. Elect me and the oceans will fall, etc. Winston Churchill was wise enough to keep this vision shimmering, but glowing independent of his actions. All he could promise his people was blood, toil, sweat and tears. But beyond that lay the vision. And there’s no denying that this goal, nebulous as it was, sustained so many in the darkest hour, which he had the brilliance to rebrand as the “finest hour”. He didn’t say, as BHO says, we must find an “exit strategy”; he didn’t say as many do now, that “we’re doomed”. He said, I don’t know how, or when, but will win. We will bear the Ring, though we do not know the way. It’s effective because it blends realism with idealism; it turns despair into hope. And he once explained, it was necessary, to be upborne, to stand-to, “because everyone realised how near death and ruin we stood. Not only individual death which is the universal experience, but incomparably more commanding the life of Britain, her message and her glory.” It is fascinating to examine how he blended the stern call to duty with optimism in his most famous speech because “without victory there is no survival.”

If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.