“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” –  George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.

Trump’s America: New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Could it be that the 20th century was the last, great century for humanity? It’s looking more like it every day.

The older I get, and hopefully the wiser, I find myself more than ever focused on the past. The present seems just awful, and the future looks dim or even dire.

Please bear with me in this moment of reflection. Don’t turn away. There is a point about the present and future.

As I sit here in the shade of the woods about 10 miles due north of the White House, sipping some fine coffee and reading the news online, it is somewhat horrifying to watch what’s going on just down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and the green Metro line from here. Part of me wants to travel as far away from this place as I can get. To find an old forest with ancient trees on the West Coast to die in, and leave the present and future to others, having no confidence that new generations are being equipped to turn things around and make them better.

In the 20th century, the great scientist Albert Einstein had said it: “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”

That’s what we all thought back when. I’m thinking back to a moment in the late 1990s. It was the early, heady days of the internet, when a conservative, Christian college professor (yes such a thing did exist then, contrary to fake news on talk radio and right-wing cable news talk that all college professors are “liberals”) tried to warn a group of doctoral students about the prospect of a fascist regime coming to power in the United States of America.

We laughed at him, or at least I did, along with a leftist doctoral student from Canada, who was so appalled at the conservatism embedded in the faculty at the University of Tennessee that he transferred out to a Ph.D. program in Iowa.

“I don’t think we are going to have to worry about that now,” I remember saying with a sly smile, like the professor didn’t know what he was talking about.

I mean his doctoral dissertation was something of a joke with us, a group of about 14 students in a communications program dedicated to the study of Science Communication, with many of us also in a secondary program for Environmental Sociology. He had traveled all the way to England on a grant to explore the question: Did Charles Darwin, the author of the ground breaking work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, issue a deathbed confession and turn back to Christianity in his final hours?

Even he had to conclude that was not the case, but still. An entire doctoral dissertation on that question? There was something wrong with this picture, and I should have known it at the time, especially after I learned that the great scientist E.O. Wilson had briefly attended the University of Tennessee but quickly transferred out to Harvard.

I thought we had it pretty well together in those days, with Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the White House, and with the World Wide Web about to open the flood gates of information to the masses like nothing the world had ever seen, at least since the invention of the printing press. We all believed then, anyone engaged in pioneering what was being published on the web, that “information is power.”

No one could have predicted then the extent to which information could be twisted and weaponized against people to such an extent. Yes, we studied the propaganda techniques of the Nazi’s in Germany. But we saw how that movement was crushed into oblivion by the U.S. military in World War II.

After all, we were all still living under a doctrine promoted by Supreme Court Justices like Louis Brandeis, who had written that “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants…”

But he also warned: “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.”

Even Jesus is reported to have said, in John 8:32, that “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

But there was also science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, the hero of Elon Musk, who said: “Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.”

We should have known, but we didn’t want to believe. We fully expected to publish the facts for all the world to see, and the result would be a new age of Enlightenment. The future would be ever brighter for future generations, as long as we could find ways to get climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation under control.

But it was not to be for long.

We celebrated the turn of the century and the new millennium like it was 1999, because it was. But things began to turn ugly pretty quickly, as the U.S. Supreme Court changed the outcome of the 2000 election and installed the conservative Republican, Texas Governor George W. Bush, over the winner, Vice President Al Gore.

It’s been mostly downhill since then, with the exception of eight years with the Obamas in the White House, and four with Joe Biden as president, which could have gone down in history as one of the most successful periods in our political history, except for the nonsense dominating the airwaves now. This administration seems hellbent on rewriting that history, and obliterating much of it, along with the new machine learning technology that is coming to the fore.

The bots won’t care about human history when they gain the power to replace us.

Mahatma Gandhi said it: “The future depends on what we do in the present.”

And Herbert Spencer, who said: “The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.”

So remember that in deciding what to do today, this week, this month, the rest of this year. We can sit by and let the new or NeoNazis turn our country into something like the misnamed “National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” or we can toss off our chains and change the present and the future. We can’t change the past, but we can choose a different future. But it will probably take more work than most people are expecting to face.

It might even require another bloody civil war, and years of deprivation and depression. Me and my Baby Boomer hippie friends are too old for this fight. We will do what we can to hang on and try to enjoy what time we have left. What are the new kids up to? Seems to me they are going along with this TikTok crap and doing nothing to fight for their own futures. I guess we will see.

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