On a cold, windy November day, Doug Collins flings open the door of a classroom at Harrow School in London. Doug, a member of the school's leadership team, waves me inside the dimly-lit room. It's lined with long rows of empty benches without backs. "Here's where Winston Churchill was a somewhat grudging student," Doug tells me. "In fact, he'd been placed in what today would be called the remedial reading class."
Doug knows I'll be interested in Churchill's early years at the school. From this austere room and unpromising beginning, Churchill went on to become a world leader--one who could see a future that marked him as "unrealistic" at best, a madman at worst.
Consider how Churchill appealed to the beleaguered British people in the grim days of the summer of 1940. The Nazi war machine had overrun Europe. The Battle of France had been lost, a debacle in which more than 30,000 British soldiers had died. The British, their empire in decline and their confidence destroyed by the carnage of World War I, stood alone against the threat of imminent invasion. Bombs fell in the heart of London. Frightened people huddled in the subways.
In the face of such a fearful reality, Churchill boldly declared that he was taking office with "buoyancy and hope." He called the British people forward to victory in what he knew would be "their finest hour." As Churchill's biographer, Isaiah Berlin, wrote, "He created a heroic mood and turned the fortunes of the Battle of Britain not by catching the mood of his surroundings but by being impervious to it, as he had been to so many of the passing shades and tones."
Churchill saw and revealed the fundamental strength of his country and its people, a strength that had been hidden by fear and despair. Seeing this inherent worth made it possible for him to hold a hopeful image of the future, even in Britain's darkest moment, and to inspire others to share that vision.
I tell this story often. For me, it is an especially moving reminder that we can choose how we hold the past, present, and future. Churchill exercised this kind of choice when he discerned the path to victory in the darkness of defeat.
I'm also encouraged when I realize that the choices Churchill made were not easy for him as a human being. After all, he experienced a great deal of what today we'd call depression, and often felt he stood alone in his beliefs.
Many of us have had the Churchillian experience of seeing strengths where others see limitations, even if in smaller ways, even if only for a fleeting moment. Each of us manages, at times, to transcend the pervasive background music of our culture: the dominant chorus of cynicism, irony, and hopelessness.
Each of us sees, from time to time, the fundamental value and strength in those around us (and sometimes even in ourselves).