It’s another one of those days — you know, when I just can’t face one more news item about dust storms in Texas, famine in Nigeria, or the death of democracy in America. (There seem to be a lot of those days recently.)

So it’s back in time I go, hopefully to find some cheery blast from the past that has had lasting effect . . . or, at the very least, even some horrific event that makes today’s news seem not so bad by comparison. And this is what I found for earlier March 5ths. (My source, as always, is the History Channel’s History.com, March 5, 2025.)

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1770: The Boston Massacre. A crowd of American colonists had gathered outside the Boston Customs House to protest British “taxation without representation,” when one of the protesters threw a snowball or similar object that struck a British soldier guarding the building. The soldier responded by firing his rifle into the crowd, and — like lemmings to the sea — his comrades-in-arms followed suit. In the end, five colonists were dead or dying, and three more injured . . . an event considered by some to be the first fatalities of the American Revolutionary War.

In and of itself, it was obviously a tragedy . . . but one that ultimately led to the establishment of the United States as the world’s cradle of democracy. Well, for 249 years, anyway.

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1946: Churchill delivers Iron Curtain speech. World War II was barely over when former ally, the Soviet Union, began exhibiting its expansionist policies. Churchill — no longer British Prime Minister — had been invited to speak at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where President Harry S Truman (a native Missourian) joined him on the platform. Praising the United States, Churchill spoke of an even closer “special relationship” between the two nations, and warned against the dangers of Joseph Stalin’s policies . . . for the first time speaking of the “iron curtain” that had descended across Eastern Europe, and the “communist fifth columns” operating in western and southern Europe.

Churchill was right, of course. The free world has continued to fight totalitarian governments in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation ever since, with only a brief period of attempted democratization during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years. But that “iron curtain” — though now somewhat more transparent — has once more descended on Putin’s Russia, and is again threatening surrounding nations.

Once more, Shakespeare said it best:

“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
[Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5.]

We never learn.

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1953: Joseph Stalin dies. Bad news for Stalin, of course, though most of the rest of the world cheered. However, the celebrations were premature, as nothing really changed for the people trapped in the Soviet Union and the other Eastern Bloc nations. There followed the usual internecine power struggle in which Georgiy Malenkov claimed authority for a while; but Nikita Khrushchev ultimately prevailed, and life — such as it was — went on as always in the USSR, though without the brutal purges of Stalin’s reign.

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1963. Hula Hoop patented. At last — a bit of fun.

Ushering in a boom in the field of orthopedic medicine, this rather odd toy had some 25 million Americans swiveling their hips as never before, with (I would presume) more than a few throwing their spines out of alignment. It had first been marketed some five years earlier by Wham-O, the same company that was responsible for the still-popular Frisbee.

There is no telling what will capture people’s imaginations . . . though in these days of electronic everything, we could probably use something new that would get us outdoors and moving. Any ideas?

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There were a few other events of note for March 5th: the 1868 impeachment trial of U.S. President Andrew Johnson; the 1917 resignation of Sweden’s prime minister over World War I policy; and a very stoned Jim Morrison (of The Doors) being charged with lewd behavior at a 1969 concert in Miami. But nothing as uplifting as the advent of the hula hoop . . . so maybe we should end on the higher note.

It seems that — no matter how far back I delve through the years and centuries — if it wasn’t bad, then it wasn’t news. Some things never change.

Maybe tomorrow.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
3/5/25