Hello, it s Monday, Dec. 14, 2020. Sometime today, according to John Hopkins University (the source I’ve been using during the coronavirus pandemic), the United States will pass a grim milestone: 300,000 Americans will have died from COVID-19 or associated complications from the disease. Globally, the total exceeds 1.6 million. No country has been spared: from China, where it started, to tiny Norway, which was quick (at least among Western democracies) to lock down and which seems to have weathered the scourge better than its neighbors.
Norway is on my mind for another reason this morning: On this date in 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first person to reach the South Pole. I generally write about U.S. history in this space. But Roald Amundsen s feat, which I first wrote about five years ago, was directly inspired by two American explorers. In addition, his can-do spirit is precisely the kind of determination we admire in the United States, and which we badly n