Raymond B. Fosdick: Old Thoughts but Forever Truths

Raymond B. Fosdick: "We Must Not Be Afraid of Change."

"When the last glacier retreated northward from what is now Connecticut, it left behind as mementos of its visit, great boulders of rock which are now strewn lavishly across the state. Several of them, as large as a corncrib and many tons in weight, were deposited on my farm, and for fifteen years I have watched one of them fight a losing battle with an ash tree. The tree evidently started in a seed lodged in a tiny pocket in the top of the rock.

"When I first saw it, it was a sturdy sapling that had made for itself a comfortable crevice for its roots. ​Today, its irresistible growth has torn the massive rock into fragments. This is the law of life. The future belongs not to rigid absolutes, whether they are primal rocks of unyielding social arrangements, but to the thing that can grow, whether it is a tree or a democracy."

Raymond B. Fosdick, "We Must Not Be Afraid of Change,"
​The New York Times, April 3, 1949

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This is the starting few paragraphs to a full article written by Raymond B. Fosdick. If you think that what we are facing today is a new threat to democracy, I would highly recommend reading it in its entirety. ​Change and the discussion of change is the way of a people united through democracy . . . a diversity, not so much achieved through shades of color or non-color—black and white, but . . . through thoughtful discussion.

Peter E. Greulich

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