History Repeats

The FlyLady suggests that we make a list of chores that we're going to do each day of the week. She calls it a "control journal." I have one, and I even use it occasionally. Today was one of those days. So, I'm upstairs in my bathroom, cleaning the mirror, and as I washed the toothpaste spots off, I thought how nice it is to have a clean house. My very next thought was how often I've had that thought while I'm doing the cleaning that I didn't want to do. I wonder how long it's going to be before I actually remember that it's worth it to take a few minutes to "swish and swipe," because the results are so nice when it's done.

So this lead to musings about how history repeats, and I've got a theory. (Doesn't everyone?) It seems like as soon as a generation starts to learn wisdom, they're old and then they die. So there are a couple of solutions to this problem that I can think of.

1. We could all live longer. Trouble is, this one's not really something that we control. Yes, we can control risks to an extent, but not all of them. It's not a Sure Thing. Unless you're Tookie Williams, you probably don't have your death on your calendar, and most of us aren't willing to go to the lengths that he did to get that appointment.

2. We could live backwards - start old and die young. I'm really not sure how this would work, biologically speaking, so I'll just move right along.

3. We could Study history. I'm not really talking about learning all the dates & names & places, although that would certainly be a start. The problem with learning only names and dates is that it's so easy to miss the Reasons. All those people who ended up being remembered by History had a Reason for what they did. And a lot of them wrote about it. I find it interesting that although I took an AP US History in high school, the teacher was more interested in assisting us to pass the test than she was in helping us understand the amazing heritage that we received from the Founding Fathers, or the incredible sacrifices that they made to bring this nation into being. We barely scratched the complexities of the Civil War.

I am left wondering, what would George Washington, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, or Abraham Lincoln think of the state of affairs now? Samuel Adams, for instance, was repeatedly offered wealth, power, and position, if he would only quit stirring up trouble in the colonies and go along with the Crown and its representatives. His refusal was so firm, and so irritating to the governor that when he offered pardon to the Colonists who would put down their arms and stop rebelling, he specifically excluded Sam Adams. I think that very few of our politicians today could be said to have that sort of personal integrity. So why do we keep sending them to Washington?

Is our own American government destined to become the same sort of tyrannical problem that the British government was in the 1700's? And what will we do about it?