Eleanor Roosevelt

After reading several articles and websites focused on Eleanor Roosevelt, it is easy to tell that she was an amazing women, who truly had a significant impact on the world. Not only serving as the eyes and ears of the president during his tenure, but forging her own international path at the UN. On different websites even, there were common words that were used to describe her, such as boundless amounts of energy, her resolve, and her ability to relate to the common man. This final point is what I would like to discuss.

For a women in her position, with no higher education background and no corporate backing, she was remarkably pristine in my opinion. I think this is really one of the key reasons why she was able to accomplish some of the daunting tasks placed before her. As most of the websites say, she was so able to communicate what the common man wanted, needed, had to have in order to flourish, that she was able to implement those needs into her work, which resulted in new benefits for all of man. Obviously the culmination of her work was Universal Declaration, but this could not have been done better by anyone else. She had the insight and wisdom to see what exactly needed to be done, and how to do it, in order to make the declaration become a reality.

These abilities of hers were obviously honed as she traveled the United States, being the eyes and ears for the president, but the fact that she had no been corrupted whatsoever by corporations or greed was really what made her stand apart.

I would also like to discuss one of her quotes. "What you don't do can be a destructive force." I definitely agree with the quote, and I think it pretty much means the same thing as "Evil triumphs when good men do nothing." Now obviously her quote might suit women a little bit more because it doesn't have the 'men' thrown in there, but I think what she is really trying to say is that results require action, and that sitting by and doing nothing can be just as destructive as actively destroying something.

This relates to a story we talked about earlier in the class about the hummingbird, who could only drop a small amount of water on a large fire, but was still able to make a difference. Rather than encouraging one to make the effort to act, her quote more or less warns about the potential danger of doing nothing.