Back to the HomepageThe topic of today, boyz and girls, is history. WAIT! COME BACK! Good. I'm not going to give you a history lesson. Instead, I'm going to talk about the value of history in society, the present and the future.
History is the absolute best teaching instrument. Not your parents, your school district, or that fine looking teacher who alwayz wore the short skirt. It teaches us all of our mistakes and makes sure that we do not forget them. So whenever we screw up in something that has already been screwed up before, like politics, the excuse, "It's never been done before," or "It was my first time," can not be used. It has happened a million times before and it was repeated again by another dumb person.
The way we learn from history is to critically examine history and have it examined by bunches and billions of people. That way, the same event is looked at with a variety of perspectives and a variety of outlooks can be gathered from the event.
One of the greatest examples of this technique is World War II and the Holocaust. This horrible demonstration of humanity's primitive and violent mind-set was not the first of it's kind. It occurred in the Ottoman Empire before and yet it still occurred again and IN THE SAME REGION of the world! You would have thought that someone would have learned from the first approximately 6 million Ottomans that died for the same reason--religious persecution.Today, millions of people are threatened by religious persecution all over the world--Israel, Iraq, Bosnia, Russia, China, all over South America, and even in the United States. No country is immune from racism. It is one of the oldest themes in human history and after the (if you are a religious person, it's the thousands of years we have been here; if you are a Evolutionary, it's the millions of years that we have been here), we have not learned that it gets humanity nowhere and is always crushed under the forceful hand of justice.
Sometimes I think that History is a being, out there somewhere, that is laughing at us and saying, "Just watch me and you will have something to learn from. But you don't watch me so you continue to SCREW UP!"
Please, the next time you have a decision to make that COULD have serious reprocussions on yourself or others, take a look back and see how others have handled a similar situation.