Consequently, we don't study history much, and the history we do study doesn't really present any lessons for us. Moreover, we have a warped sense of history and our role in it, if we even bother to get the facts right at all.
We're too arrogant and self-righteous to think we can learn from history, so we blunder into the same mistakes over and over again.
For example:
- We forget that we've been trying this self-rule and government thing for a lot less time than most of the rest of the world, and assume that what we do will work for everyone.
- Every foreign war we've ever been involved with has been characterized by misunderstanding the enemy and then learning the hard way things that we should have been able to see coming if we'd bothered to look at history and the writing on the wall.
- Every time we've tried to do something really great domestically (ending slavery, women's rights, civil rights, Social Security, you name it), we've failed to plan ahead enough to set up something that will actually work in the long term, if it even got off the ground smoothly at all.
The saddest thing is that I don't see anything changing in my lifetime. I don't see any Congress ever being elected that could ever do anything other than play petty partisan politics rather than doing anything significant. I don't see any administration ever being elected, even at the state level, that could overcome the flaws inherent in the forms our legislatives bodies now take.
And I don't blame our systems. The systems are fine - it is our implementations of them that are screwed up. And I blame the media for that. The media has created an environment where the people who ought to be serving society in leadership won't do it, and the only people who do seek leadership are those who are willing to go through the media firestorm.
Thus, the greatest and most fatal flaw in our system, inherent from its inception...a free press with insufficient controls to keep it from becoming a driver on society. If there were enough sane people in this nation, we'd repeal that part of the Constitution. Totally free speech with no controls has created for us a nightmare from which there is no waking up.
