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David McCullough wrote a book, 1776, which I greatly enjoyed listening to. The book's final chapter reminds me our current crisis:
He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.
Without Washington's leadership and unrelenting perseverance, the revolution almost certainly would have failed.
The year 1776, celebrated at the birth year of the nation and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too, they would never forget.
Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning -- how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character made the difference -- the outcome seemed little short of a miracle."
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