history ... again

-- A thirteen-year-old boy hanged himself because he worried that his parents could not afford his school books.

-- When at last the government stepped in with some relief money, men on bulldozers dug enormous trenches. Selected, wasted cattle were driven into the trenches and perhaps 20 men with rifles stood on the rim and methodically shot them to death. Uncomprehending children watched. Less wasted cattle were shipped to Chicago for slaughter. When a farmer asked if he might keep one calf from his herd as a means of feeding his family, he was told no, the relief program wouldn't allow that ... everything had to go if the farmer wanted his relief money.

-- A man driving home in the dust storm got stuck two miles from home. He decided to walk the rest of the way... it was only two miles, after all. He was found dead the next day, suffocated perhaps in the relentless, dirt-filled air.

The Dust Bowl.

-- If I got it correctly ... after the Vikings had been either routed or assimilated in England, the land was awash with fighting men who no longer had anything to fight, men who took to asserting their power over peasants and others who did not know how to fight. A lawless time. The church came up with a solution and sent these and similar men on the mainland out on a bloody, 200-year series of Crusades in the Middle East. Go kill the infidels ... which the fighting men did. And although the Crusades did not come up with much outside the blood-letting, they did come up with texts and scrolls and other forms of learning which entranced the homeland and led to the cultivation of learning and civilization on mainland Europe... and the so-called Dark Ages became, bit by bit, a thing of the past.

So much for bits and snippets of TV yesterday.

How lightly the mind skips over the past. Good stuff, bad stuff, wondrous stuff, horrific stuff ... is there any other recourse? The wise may prognosticate, the tender-hearted may wail but one of the dumbest wise-sounding lines I ever heard was George Santayana's "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." 

No one learns from history. Everyone repeats it. The upscale intellectual suggestion -- implicit or explicit -- that "we can learn from our mistakes" is not the same as saying anyone can escape mistakes altogether. The mind skips gaily, no matter how furrowed the brow, and "learning from history" is wishful thinking at best. Yes, the slaughter of the Jews and Armenians were terrible; World War II was an inferno of insanity; and 2+2 does not equal 5 ... but that was then and this is now.

I am not suggesting that anyone be ignorant of history. But I am suggesting that the lessons learned are hardly capable of some salvific, pipe-smoking, I-see-clearly effect. Those who study history and those who don't ... well, look at the historical record. Better to study hard and collate as best anyone might, in the relaxed and perhaps humbling knowledge that I am and will remain, like my forbears, an understandable fool. 

No point in trying to do what cannot be done. 

A reality check never hurt anything.