We Are Not About Fear

DEAR MONTICELLOANS,

As the news continues to worsen about just everything, we must remember just how we exist today. It is not from fear.

If that was the case, our ancestors would never have left the safety of their homelands to cross thousands of miles of oceans in very adverse conditions to a land that did not turn out to have “streets paved in gold.” They made their own fate.

Indeed, this town named Monticello, Italian meaning little mountain, would still be a high place in a forest if not for people who had the guts to stretch the boundaries of their safety and imagination to travel hundreds of miles, walking here in some cases to this “Little Mountain” beside Towee Creek.

When faced with adversity, even threatened epidemics, I have to look no further than my own family for courage. My mother was born the very year that the greatest epidemic in recorded history began, the Spanish Flu, in 1917.

Millions died around the world, yet my mother, 103 years old this year, her sister, her parents and her grandparents, all survived, and the same on my father’s side. Then, as now, no cure, but now we have vaccines to help us. Influenza kills when the lungs fail.

Each generation, each century, there is a seemingly insurmountable mountain to climb. Once there were thousands afflicted with polio and then there was a vaccine by Jonas Salk which changed the world.

Once thousands died from tuberculosis consumption and AIDS and many other diseases thought to be incurable and then, a person, a group of people, found the answers to the incurable. Take nothing for granted.

“The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.” The most excellent Edgar A. Poe

Best Regards,

A Fellow Monticelloan