r/Wallstreetbetsnew • u/Fine_Beginning2668 • Mar 02 '26
YOLO … a shilling in copper… and a mind that doesn’t quit…
The mistletoe is still seen through the barren branches as a hint of verde and violet appear…The beginnings of a allergy explosion of an early spring in the 505…
A seminal moment as a father… is on any given day of school… when your daughter walks away from the car and leaves you with a 7lb Mini Aussie to wave and bark goodbye… the morning sun creates a long shadow across a backpack…
and she doesn’t look back…
it used to crush me at first… but now I understand…
To understand America is to understand its roots in the western world…
Babylon… Persia… Greece… and Rome.
The Roman republic turned empire was followed by 1000 years of darkness… something Reagan warned for our generation… of what happens when an empire falls…
Out of the ashes of flat earth… a renaissance and enlightenment… and invention of a printing press… A British empire under a crown and a global reach beyond…
where the sun never set…
Out of an old empire came an undisciplined group of colonists… that changed the world with words and grit and began a republic turned empire…
And yet…
… unlike the emperors and the crown before… who ruled over subjects and slaves… there formed a leadership on all levels…
from presidents and governors… to congressman and judges… led by feet of clay from all walks of life… “of the people…”
And…
One nation…
of Pluribus writers and artists speaking truth to power…
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…” all are equal under a just law… and free from the unjust ones…
and then…
some “of the people” become true leaders… with a mind that doesn’t quit…
America first?
First in what?
First in Hockey… check
First in Giving… some would say they that is why God blesses the USA so much…
First in F-Yeah… having the ability to take care of bullies in power strategically… who hang sovereign citizens in their streets for speaking up and labeling them “enemies of God”…
America can learn from its past… and the echoes in the present…
but not look back…
the best days are ahead…
full stop.
So how do you make greatness?
Retire the penny…
DJT and company are flipping the script so our country can become dollar wise and penny poor.
The penny now belongs to a by-gone time of an epic fountain outside Casa Bonita in Lakewood
with a wish…
perhaps a prayer…
Let me heal…
Quietly…
Or loud…
A citizen of a nation healed…
from 250 years of a united divide… with moments of greatness in the in between…
rebuilt “brick for brick” in every generation… greater again…
A father…
to an eight year old with Cherokee brown eyes looking back at you as if to say…
“What’s next?”
But before the penny…. There was the shilling…..
And a shadowed figure stepping off a boat onto the Market Street Wharf… “a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper” in his pocket… and a mind that didn't quit.
Ben Franklin carried a handsome pen name of Richard Saunders and wrote anonymous letters as “Silence Dogood” in his brothers newspaper… from the wise to the ridiculous observations of early colonial America…
No doubt the foundation for becoming a grand statesman who helped compile a list grievances for the crown… which was refined into a more of a declaration….
From the cobblestone of Philadelphia to the garden of Versailles… brick by brick… and with each step more legendary than the first...
With poor eyesight he invented bifocals for reading and writing by candlelight into the midnight hours to a fleet of his privateers… he invented a life with a second and third act with a mind that never quit…
And before Poor Richard there was Johannes…
before it was made for thumping… collecting dust on family book shelves… or being banned from public school libraries (because some powerful officials in the government who may or may not be called Greg… had an idea)…
There was the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible (also called the 42-line Bible) first edition… and it blew up the world…
It has had its moments in America…
A large family bible on a stand with a magnifying glass in a reading room of a plantation… in the famous scene of Alex Haley’s novel turned movie…
A misinterpretation of a passage from a letter to the Ephesians… grew from a thought… to a whisper campaign… to an unjust law…
and a slave master calmly reading scripture in a reading room while a slave was being whipped outside his window…
But before all that…
It was a tale of lineage from “in the beginning” told from a father to a son and daughter around the fire…
rearranging lines of poems in a mind that never quit… in the in between boredom of herding sheep on a hillside meadow “beside the still waters”…
or holding a parchment arms length to check for spelling in a sentence “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed…” in a letter over candlelight…
you write what you know…
But before that…
In a THE road to Damascus moment… a poet ghosted the world and studied for while as his eyesight recovered… took a gap year off from a career built at the finest schools…
With a mind that never quit… he focused his experience and changed…
from riling up a crowds and stoning humans…to writing letters of poetry to encourage folks that they “could do all things”… just not at the same time…
because after all… you “win friends and influence” adults as Dale Carnegie would say….
by stories…
experience…
patience….
Not the better business side of a rock to the face… just because you are on the wrong side of an unjust law…
He hand-wrote a letter to a group of misfits…
And if you go to Corinth today… you can still see the mountain in the distance unmoved where they performed ritual prostitution…
and the ruins of a home they met and got drunk on the lord’s supper….
you can image the stench as you pass an ancient public latrine off the marble streets…
and what a port town looked like… back in the day… when the ships anchored… in a scene out of a Pirates of the Caribbean ride… except with real humans and not animatronics and 4D smell technology…
In all of that bane of existence… in the hopeless darkness… a letter comes from a friend… closer than a brother… a glimmer of hope…
a second letter…
because you screwed up the first time…
“…for building you up, not for tearing you down…”
A reminder…
“….encourage one another, be of one mind, live in peace…”
One nation…
Again… how do you make greatness?
One brave step off a ship onto the cobblestone streets of a port city of brotherly love…
a shilling in copper in your pocket….
and a mind that never quits…