Do We Learn From History?

A friend, visceral, sent me a link. I use the term "friend" a bit loosely, for I am speaking of a chap that makes me attempt to think at 5:00 A.M. No matter how one slices it, it is no jocose matter to stoke the mental boiler at that hour. That's how accidents happen, railroad accidents as well as mental accidents: premature stoking of the boiler. I mean, the old Great Northern jumps the tracks, would you want to be around? Anyway, the link is: http://thisisby.us/index.php/content/history_has_taught_us_nothing and is the article: History has Taught Us Nothing we were put on earth to destroy each other by abaciscus You will have to read the article, for I am not in the habit of synopsizing at 5:00 A.M. If you wish that someone give you summaries in the A.M., hire a valet or gentleman's gentleman or a personal secretary. The only people who learn from History are the evil. Evil people have learned to compel and force others. Evil people have learned to control the mythic symbols of memory, to compel obedience in the present, and to shape the mythic structures of the potential future. We have not so learned. When we are confronted by school boys taking rifles to school and shooting their mates, we are aghast, wonder what remedies to apply, then shrug and say, "I dunno." ( I don't know). We are aghast, because it is so evil and so new. The evil have thus created a new future, which now becomes the Present, and nowadays we have many such shootings: the new age has thus been defined. I look and see a great chain of Memory: guns and violence in film, books, and everyday life; I see violence and vengeance celebrated; I see scenarios of the lone yet good individual who goes up against a society evil in its rule over him; I see rogue justice and wanton violence portrayed as saving our way of life. Thus has the new age been defined. Symbols are Spirit...they never go away! No one thing renders a man evil. The fact that I played "cowboys and Indians" does not mean that I shall be violent in the future... ...but it does create a web of imagery... It creates the background for growth, the sets, the staging, and it does so over long years, not short term. As we live our lives beset by everything from Capital punishment to "cowboys and Indians" to Abortion, our dialogue of death become ever and ever extensive, and we spin out a web like a Wolfram process that leads...we do not know where. If we believe History has taught us nothing, we have created the scenario for Armageddon. Read the above article as if it were a documentary, a collage of vile images flashing before us. The script reads, "History Has Taught Us Nothing, a documentary, running time 20 minutes..." and it employs what? It employs images: Pol Pot, Nazism, Eichmann...words and images and sub-plots all woven together to create the script. CREATE your own script. Build your own scenario. Take control of the Past, the Present, and the Future. How? The Founding Fathers did so. They said "...we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal..." They learned from the Past, defined and created symbols in the Present, and determined the Future up until the present day. It takes a whole Village to teach Myths: the narratives, the stories. Stories are memories, told in the present, and have the power to affect the future. Past, Present, Future...all tied together with symbols. The Present is the short, brief time we have available to work on symbols; the Present is the forge of the symbolic web we weave. Therefore, the Present must know full well what its business is and what it should be doing. Simply put, where are the Mother Theresas in the article? There are none. The writer's sense of despair is a direct result of his imagery: no redeeming image of holiness to grace the page. Without images of Redemption, our story will be the story of destruction. Reach out and choose a Saint or Sidi or Arhat to study for today. Let that be your first step. Laugh if you will. I promise I won't laugh when you can't do it.