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For the avoidance of doubt... Yes... I definitely have an opinion... |
 Welcome to my Blog!! Having an opinion is better than not having a thought of your own. I have many of both.... Pull up a pew and grab a hot, steaming mug of your choice. |
| Prompt: "A generation which ignores history has no past and no future." Robert Heinlein. Write about what you think of this quote and/or about what had the most impact on your life. *** Ignoring the past means we are doomed to repeat it. That is what the quote means. There is a reason "History is repeating itself" is such a famous/common quote. It’s because humanity is innately stupid… and we keep voting stupid people in charge. Generationally, we struggle to learn from our past mistakes. Kids don’t want to learn from their parent's mistakes, unless they felt/experienced the consequences directly, and that is compounded when it’s our grandparents, or great grandparents… It’s the same with societal generations. People who weren’t around for 9/11 or the fall of the Berlin Wall don’t experience or fully comprehend the significance of those events. They read the theory, hear the stories… but it’s hard to feel it. I studied World War I, World War II, and the Russian Revolution – I wrote essays, memorised dates, and analysed the impacts in the cold light of day, with hindsight. I didn’t feel it the way my grandmother did at the age of nineteen in 1939. I read about nightly air raid sirens and houses/communities flatten or torn apart by bombs; she tended to the wounds of the people caught up in those raids. The psychological fallout and trauma that particular generation experienced is what helped put in place the safeguards (such as NATO) to prevent it from happening again. Subsequent generation don’t have the same trauma. We don't understand it on a molecular level - it's easy to dismiss reoccurring patterns. There were changes and new regulation following the Wall Street crash in 1929, often cited as the worst financial and economic disaster of the 20th century, yet those lessons weren’t enough to stop the global recessions of 1975, 1982, 1991, and 2009 - three of which I was alive during… The similarities that can be drawn between what happened in the early twentieth century in Europe with appeasement, unchecked dictatorship and societal censorship, and what is happening now is crazy. People ask, “How could someone like Hitler come into power?” but we see it in over and over again, across the world, in real time. There seems to be so many historical events in my lifetime. It's hard to choose the most significant or impactfully; the global recession... the global pandemic... the gulf war (I and II), the assassination of Osama Bin Laden... But the one that 'haunts' me the most is 9/11. I remember where I was when the news of the Twin Towers broke, followed by the other attacks. It felt like the whole world stood still. |
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