WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH US?
by OPOVV, ©2013
(Feb. 8, 2013) — The underlying premise is the survival of the species. How this goal is accomplished depends on the foresight and plain old luck of the life forms involved. For instance, you’re a queen bee looking for a home and you happen to choose a school bus. Bad decision, because as soon as you’re discovered, you’ll be wiped out by yet another life form, us humans. But what if the earth got bombarded by the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet instead of Jupiter in 1994? I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it: we’d been wiped out. Bad luck.
Anybody can play the “Bad Luck” game. It’s the same as the “What If?” game. What if Hitler had been killed during World War I? What if the Admirals witnessing Billy Mitchell sinking ships had lost their sunk-in “Battleship Mentality”? Would America have begun building carriers in lieu of the obsolete Battlewagons prior to World War II? On Monday morning, what if the quarterback had taken the sack rather than blindly thrown the ball which resulted in an interception?
There’s an avoidance policy that we humans have access to: history. Of course, just because we can witness the mistakes our ancestors committed doesn’t necessarily translate into policies implemented today to avoid those same catastrophes, as in Easter Island. The current thought is that the inhabitants of the island succeeded in depleting their forest to the point where they simply ran out of fuel for their fires. They, quite obviously, failed to maintain a sustainable supply of fuel, and they also should have maintained a stable population level rather than breed as rodents.
If we’re rich in anything, it’s the various forms of government that we’ve come up with throughout millennia. Anthropologists have documented a multitude of ways we have governed ourselves, with an emphasis on what actually seems to work and that which has no chance of being beneficial whatsoever. A case in point is the Constitution of what used to be the USSR (it’s one thing to state an ideal, but to set the stated into practice is an entirely different animal). Just as, on paper, Socialism sounds like the panacea of all possible governments, we have seen that in reality, it is a terribly destructive form of government where the intellectually challenged are in positions of problem-solving when they and their peers are not mentally equipped to discern problems or their solutions. The end result? Failure, and there are enough examples to prove the point to convince even the most challenged Obot.
The human spirit cannot be contained. Those cultures which embrace the dreamer and condemn sloth, those people who reward innovation and abhor dishonesty, those who reward free thinking over no thinking, stories of utopia over censorship, songs of freedom from ignorance and tyranny, open sunshine from closed-door (Congressional hearings) snitches, turning in neighbors as if we’re reliving the Salem Witch hunts (with the same short-term results: satisfied greed for the price of self-respect), will endure, will be a benefit to our species.
Take a look at what we’ve achieved and where our country is at now. America is on the decline, with the whole world overpopulated with clueless people, not knowing their purpose in life. Millions and perhaps billions are without the slightest hint of personal responsibility to their country and their world, let alone to themselves. In the United States, millions are parroting utter nonsense as if they’re quoting from the New Testament. Political correctness isn’t free speech, and following blindly will only lead to a bad end, something we best not forget.
Supporting the demise of the Constitution makes one my enemy.
OPOVV