Lessons from history. It’s a concept that has inspired many quotable quotes:
“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
-George Santayana
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to always remain a child.”
-Cicero
And, my personal favorite:
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
-Mark Twain
Are there really people who don’t know anything about history? That is so weird!
I think so, too, 9, and there are even more who are compelled to study history in their school years but never actually learn from it. In short, to make the same mistakes over and over again due to lack of awareness or lack of interest in events happening around them.
Pure intellectual laziness.
Agreed, Lily. This week, I’ve realized quotes about the importance of history just aren’t catchy enough to capture the general public’s limited attention span. So I’m working on some new ones.
Oh dear.
The first one has to do with economic disparity.
What’s that?
The unequal distribution of wealth, income, and economic opportunities among individuals or groups. It’s a huge problem in today’s world of clueless billionaires, allegedly brilliant people who don’t seem to understand the implications of the wealthiest top ten percent of households owning two-thirds of the wealth.
That sounds like a story problem.
One story that illustrates this problem is the French Revolution. Economic disparity between the commoners and the nobility, plus the King’s massive spending and huge national debt from funding too many wars, led to an uprising. The common folk rose against the nobility and executed a great many of them. Though Marie Antoinette, France’s queen at that time, didn’t really say “Let them eat cake” when people were starving because they had no bread, let’s combine this idea with the decapitations rich folk suffered at the guillotine to craft a snappy and highly visual quote:
“It’s hard to eat cake when your head is on a pike.”
Ew! Good one!
I’m trying to make it easy for the billionaire- -whose mega yacht docked at a port in the state where he recently laid off 1,400 employees- -to understand this key lesson of the French Revolution.
Besides economic lessons, history has social lessons as well. Here’s a lesson from recent history, inspired by an individual running for the Senate not long ago:
“He who makes disparaging remarks about childless women with cats will lose respect if he joins forces with someone who complains about being the victim of witch hunts.”
True, but that one runs a bit long.
I’ll work on it, Lily.
Lessons from history: When history is told from more than one perspective, the lessons are more complex. . .
The semi quincentennial of the Declaration of Independence doth approach this July 4th. Reflect on the American Revolution, and you’ll eventually think of England’s King George III. Though the “mad king’s” worst episodes of mental illness (what today’s psychologists and historians seem to believe was bipolar disorder) happened well after 1776, there were guardrails in place to mitigate the damage his later erratic behavior could cause. These guardrails were part of the British constitution and enforced by Parliament. A balance of powers. Imagine that!
Like we have here, with the legislative, judicial and executive branches providing checks and balances on each other.
It more or less worked that way in your time, Lily, but now we’re seeing something different. The majorities in the legislative and judicial branches are falling down in their responsibility to check the actions- -many of them illegal and highly damaging- -of the executive branch. The only motivations I can ascribe to this behavior are fear, greed, or both.
Are you serious? The very thought makes me sick to my stomach.
Me too, but what’s the quote?
“Those who egregiously fail in their duty to provide checks and balances in a democratic republic will end up with their sorry butts on the wrong side of history.”
I can’t believe you said butts!
And yet I did. But here’s a concise version for you tender ears, 9:
“Shame on you!”
