(SBA) – The world as a whole has no respect for time. They don’t because they think they are going to live forever. Because they think they are going to live forever, they live for the minute, for now, like a drug addict in a furious search for their next fix.
Evidence of lack of respect for time is seen in the incredible short-term memories of humans.
*“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
“In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.” -- George Santayana
*Edmund Burke wrote in his 1790 book titled “Reflections on the Revolution in France,”
that “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
*In 1948 influential columnist Walter Lippmann published an anonymous attribution:
“Conceivably General Robertson is right when he says that “these are strange times…. They have no parallel in history.” But he would do well to bear in mind the saying that those who do not learn from the experience of history are doomed to repeat it.”
*In 1962 U.S. politician Barry Goldwater employed an instance of the saying:
“It has been wisely said that “men who will not learn from the past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.”
*In 1972 U.S. politician Frank Church employed another version of the saying:
“It is truly said that those who cannot learn from the mistakes of the past are destined to repeat them.”
Your grandparents lived through a nationwide Great Depression (1929-1939). When America went belly up, the rest of the world followed. Those years saw vast unemployment, poverty and desolation. The years 1929-1939, at the same time, saw the creation of fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan. We would go to war with all three and lose over 1-million of our young men.
We forget that the end of World War I (1914-1918) planted the seed for World War II.
We forgot that the Great Depression was brought on by vulnerabilities in the global economy, financial speculation, blunders by the Federal Reserve System, the Gold Standard, and the signing of the Smoot-Hawley Act.
We got out of the Great Depression as a result of World War II. The world war ended the Depression, not President Franklin Roosevelt. We’ve dismissed what the world war cost us in human lives. We were happy it ended and that we won; but in our delirium of victory, we forgot the human toll. Setting up national holidays (May 31, Sept. 11, Nov. 11, Dec. 7, and others) would be better served if we kept the history alive daily instead of commemorative dates.
I’m writing this because, as I stated at the beginning, humans do not respect time. They don’t learn because they don’t read and study. Because they don’t read and study, they do exactly what Albert Einstein is attributed to have said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
If we respected time, daily, we wouldn’t need reminders in the form of commemorative dates.
In 1940, the Soviet Union, who were allies of the Nazis and shared in the booty of overwhelming Poland in 1939, individually murdered with a bullet in the back of the head, some 20,000 POW Polish officers. The Russians buried the Poles in layers. In June 1941, the Russians skedaddled out of Poland with the Nazis hot on their trail. The Germans discovered the piles of Poles and announced their findings to the world.
The Russians called the announcement Nazi propaganda and continued to do so for the next 50 years, until an investigation uncovered the facts that the Russians lied. They were guilty of what became known as the Katyn Forest Massacre.
The best thing that happened in WWII is that one rotten political system (National Socialism) went to war against another rotten political system (Soviet Union).
In the meantime, we never asked why Britain and France, never questioned the Soviet attack on Poland (Sept. 17, 1939), but condemned the Nazis for their attack on Poland (Sept. 1, 1939).
Later, when America entered the war (Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941), the U.S., Britain, and the exiled free French living in England, learned nothing about Russia. We overlooked the fact that they were buddies with the Nazis and that they robbed, stole, and laid waste all of eastern Poland during their occupation. (They did it again after WWII, 1945-1991.)
Poland didn’t count. Russia made sure to that.
It never seems to matter that the Soviets are masters at lying, cover-ups, internal and external purges, executions of opponents, criminal leaders, false claims, gulags, torture, and seeking world domination by any means available. Their history provides evidence of what they are and what they’ve always been – untrustworthy, deceitful, manipulative, intrusive, and disrespectful of all neighboring countries.
We helped them survive the Nazi invasion, sending vast stores of food, military equipment – planes, tanks, weapons – only to see them turn on us after 1945.
We never learn.
Russia will always be what it is today. Always. It’s a country that evolved under an iron fist. They will always be ruled by dictators because that’s all the people there know. To the people, freedom is working, eating, and sleeping. That’s all they know, and it’s what their children learn and what their children’s children will learn.
Learn by respecting time. Once a minute passes, it’s lost, and there’s no way you or anyone can retrieve it. Time. What are you going to do with it?
