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History Is Important To The Present

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Irish statesman Edmund Burke is often misquoted as having said, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with the aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” while British statesman Winston Churchill wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”     From the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences As someone who has spent most of her life studying and even living history, it causes me real angst when I hear someone say "who needs to know all that old stuff?"  Wow, if only folks in Pompeii had retained the knowledge that sometimes the big mountain over yonder blew up they might have had a better idea of how to handle matters in 79 CE when Vesuvius buried the town. History matters.  If you do not know where you have been you will just return to the same mistakes over and over.  You won't be able to correctly understand what is going on arou...
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The Events That Mark A Generation

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Every generation has an event or series of events that set up who we will become, something that happens in late childhood through our middle teens.   For my grandparents it was World War One and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic.  For my parents it would be Pearl Harbor and the subsequent World War Two.  For my millennial son it was Columbine when he was 14, followed by 9/11 when he was 16.   A year later he had to deal with the Beltway Snipers. For me it started with the assassination of President John Kennedy when I was 10.  And yes, I was one of the millions watching when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot.  In 1967 I was terrified by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and two months later, Bobby Kennedy.  But the final blow was the Kent State Massacre in 1970 when I was 17.   The opening chords of CSNY's Ohio put me right back to where I was in 1970. To be fair, I was already a pretty fucked up kid.  My dad left when I was 5, whic...
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Fully Vaccinated Doesn't Mean What It Used To Mean

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I am disgusted by the deliberate ignorance on the part of right-wing media and those in Congress.  The science has been repeatedly articulated by actual experts.  Here are some basics: 1.    Covid-19 (named for the year in which it first appeared) is a new virus.  As such no one knew what it might do.   Other lethal viral epidemics -- smallpox, polio,  measles -- were around for centuries before we had sufficient knowledge to stop them.  Smallpox has been completely eradicated, but both polio and measles are set for a major comeback, and neither is as lethal as Covid-19. 2.  Not every virus can be controlled by vaccination.  HIV is a virus.  There is no vaccination because vaccines work with the immune system, which is precisely what HIV attacks.  Immunity has to be established over time.  As yet, we don't know how immune we actually are from Covid-19.  Colds and influenza are viruses for which we can get only a...
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Why History Is Never Accurate

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Why History Is Never Accurate  Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense . Consider that you are standing on the road and in the foreground you see a massive traffic accident while in the distance a factory explodes.  For you, the two events are simultaneous, but when you make your report to the authorities which do you describe first?  Do you go by proximity, putting the car crash goes first or by the size of the damage in which case, the factory goes first.  What makes an event important depends on both the narrator and the audience. That's the problem with any narrative, no matter how well informed and specific.  The teller is going to make choices as to what to relate and what to leave out, as well as the order in which events are depicted.    Add to this the problem of an expected account and some lies become self-perpetuating so that tellers start to alter their own narratives to fit what the audience believes ought to be i...
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Geas and the Politics of Trump

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Geas (pron. gaysh): In ancient Celtic mythology a geas is a personal taboo or obligation, usually placed upon a hero by the Gods.  Adherence to one's geas is supposed to enhance power and prestige.  Violation of geas leads to death and destruction. In the Irish story of   CúChulainn, the great hero was under a geas  to never to eat the flesh of dogs nor was he was permitted to refuse food offered by women.   His downfall was then wrought by enemies who contrived to have an old hag offer him a bowl of dog stew.  Either way he was doomed and thus he rode on to his death.  M y son reminded me today of geas and how it applies to the current political climate.  While it appears that Donald Trump is trapped by conflicting geas, no Gods were involved. His  ego demands that he reach for the highest and most visible achievement possible, but it also demands that he never ever be perceived as a lose r.  And it was all fine for him until...
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Reason and Facts For Sane Discourse

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  Discussing Religion and Politics: Is It Possible? This is my paternal grandmother, Eleanor Phelps Wilds (1895-1967), a prominent lady in Aiken, SC society and a staunch member of the Republican Party.  She was a wealthy Yankee who made her home in the deep South at a time when the Republicans were still the "party of Lincoln" -- progressive with actual principles and policies.   When the GOP were bested by northern Democrats' liberal labor agenda and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the GOP launched the so-called "southern strategy" that embraced the conservative highly racist agenda of the Southern Democrats, we began to lose the ability to talk about anything of consequence.  People now say "don't discuss religion or politics." In fact, the original advice in etiquette books was "never talk religion, politics or money in polite conversation," referring to the idle chat at dinner parties.  Granny always said "don't...
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