as a potentially pivotal week is poised to commence, here's a timely little quote i've been saving for awhile that i want you all to ponder for a minute:
We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot.
when and by whom was this statement made, you ask? well, i'll tell ya: it was made by fdr's treasury secretary, the venerable henry morgenthau, in may 1939--you know, after almost two full terms of the "new deal" that was supposed to fix the great depression.
why is it that we never learn from history?
4 comments:
Historian Stephen Ambrose was once asked what he'd learned from spending a lifetime immersed in books. He replied, "When you study history, you learn that people just don't learn from history."
That's amazing. The old pulling the wool over thier eyes forever and ever. Then again, I can't complain about human redundancy - like I learned anything from my mistakes...
History, WHAT history? It's not a subject that most students like and the last couple of generations (as in GenX and GenY) have very little understanding or even awareness of events since a year or two before they were born, if even that far back.
I taught design at MIT for 32 years and concurrently had a part time gig running the stage for a private school nearby for 22 years. The level of real knowledge of history was low among both the high school and MIT students, although the private school did better at sending them out with some.
Still, "the past" isn't "cool." NOW is cool, not that old stuff--and nobody wants to be uncool.
hubbard: i can always count on you for some little act of erudition that'll elevate this common blog outta the gutter for at least a minute or two.
luis: yup.
will: yup, again--when you and i were coming up, people were at least apologetic when they didn't know history; now, they're almost proud of their ignorance.
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