Rolling with the Punches

       Rolling with the punches, was one of my dad’s favorite expressions. Born before the first world war, he lived through the great depression, working in the Civilian Conservation Corps, cutting trees in the pine forests of Georgia. He did what he could to help his family.

        Charismatic figures like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, rallied a nation to fight the depression. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” FDR asserted defiantly in one of his radio fireside chats. Contemporaries like Winston Churchill, and past presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, and national heroes like Admiral Nelson before him, he knew that people need leadership and inspiration in times of trouble.

       After my dad married my mother in the 1930’s, he began working as a fireman for the city of Buffalo. The men didn’t make much money then, so he often had a second and third job to make ends meet. With a brood of twelve children, there was often a medical, personal or social calamity to contend with. Dad never got excited, just calmly dealt with the situation at hand as best he could manage.

      “You have to roll with the punches” he told us. “When calamity comes your way, grit your teeth and deal with it. Soon enough you will come out on the other end of the crisis.” The Good Lord knows that he got to practice what he preached often enough with a gang of hooligans like my brothers and I. Most of us weren’t well known for angelic behavior, in school or anywhere else.

        Throughout the years, I have thought often of dad’s advice, when adversity came my way. Like he advised, I just gritted my teeth and got through the problem times as best I could manage, until things lightened up, as they always do.

        I think dad’s advice is timely now, as we struggle with a national pandemic that is threatening us all. We will get through this. Sure, times are hard and probably will get harder. But, we are all of us descended from tough immigrant stock who were not used to caving in to adversity. When I think of the challenges that the first wave of my ancestors faced when first landing on these shores, I am daunted by their courage and perseverance.

Waves of deadly cholera mowed them down in Buffalo in the 1830’s and 1850’s. They didn’t have much in the way of medical care then. Sanitation was primitive and regular sources of food and water were never guaranteed. But, they “rolled with the punches” and got through the tough times, bless them every one.

In Britain, instances of the collective heroism of its people are too numerous to mention. In a two-thousand-year history, you meet and overcome a few national challenges along the way.

        All of the immigrants who came to America toughed it out as well. And the British working class fought like a lion to survive all of the travails that assaulted them during their history. No one gave them anything, they worked hard and they toughed it out and survived, so that we their descendants could have a better life. And we too will come out on the other side of this current threat. Perhaps, we will be a little beat up from the experience and even lose some family and friends, but we will get through it, like our forbearers did.

       So, take heart America and Great Britain. Lift your heads up and draw a fresh resolve that you and your family will manage. And then, go looking for someone else to help out during these difficult times. We are at our finest as Americans and British meeting the challenges of adversity. We have to remember our collective spirit  when Churchill defiantly told a threatening Hitler, “We will fight you on the beaches, we will fight you in the streets, we will never surrender.” You were one people then, who rose from the disaster of Dunquerque, with a new resolve and a new spirit to make things right. It is who and what the British are as a nation.

                                    -30-

                              (695 words)

                        Joseph Xavier Martin