Dec. 30, 2006 - 19:17 MST

SANTAYANA SAID IT

Quote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemed to repeat it." Over and over again these words echo in my mind and heart. Bob Herbert of The New York Times had a column in yesterday's The Rocky Mountain News dealing with facts of the present. Quoted in full here:

HISTORY SHOWS THAT WE NEVER LEARN LESSONS OF HISTORY

"it would not be easy to find two men more different than Gerald Ford and James Brown. But I had a similar reaction to each of their deaths -- a feeling of disappointment at some of the routes the nation has traveled since their days of greatest prominence."

"Both men were important figures, symbolically more than substantively, at crucial periods in postwar American history -- Brown at the crest of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s and Ford during the "long national nightmare" of Watergate."

"Both were unlikely harbingers of the new. Brown became the very embodiment of black pride, a troubadour exhorting his followers to "Say it Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud" at a time when schoolhouse doors were opening and unprecedented opportunities were beckoning to black Americans after centuries of almost unimaginative degradation."

"Ford was just more than the designated healer after Watergate. The U.S. was also in the final throes of the long national nightmare of Vietnam. And it was stuck in a protracted energy crisis. The nation was looking for a way forward."

"My disappointment stems from the opportunities never seized and the lessons never learned from those two periods."

"Brown's message was relentlessly upbeat and optomistic. Despite the continuing plague of racism, there were dreams in the 1980s of fabulous days ahead for black Americans, days in which the stereotypes and degradation of the past would be erased by a new era of educational, professional and cultural achievement."

"These dreams did not include visions of an enormous economically disadvantaged population, or a perennially ragged public school system, largely segregated in fact, if not by law, that would turn out generations of educationally deprived children; or a black prison population so vast and so enduring it would come to seem normal to legions of black youngsters, or a level sustained violence that has condemned thousands upon thousands of black youngsters to an early grave."

"It would be foolish to suggest that the U.S. as a whole hasn't made trememdous progress since the 1960s and '70s. But it's impossible to reflect on the presidency of Gerald Ford, who formally ended U.S. participation in the war in Vietnam, and fail to notice that his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld and chief of staff, Dick Cheney, were among the chief architects of the current calamity in Iraq. There were lessons galore to be learned from Vietnam. But Rumsfeld and Cheney, like frat boys skipping an important lecture, ignored them."

"The trauma of the 1973 oil embargo spooked the country into action on the energy front. Fuel economy standards were ratcheted up, and improvements were made in the energy efficiency of household appliances. But those successful early efforts were undermined by the conservative politial tide of the past several years."

"Now we're confronted with the dire threat of global warming, and as usual there is no plan."

"If history tells us anything, it's that we never learn from history. We could have stepped back from the war in Iraq and stepped up to the challenge of global warming. We could have learned something when James Brown was on the charts and Gerald Ford was in the White House."

Maybe next time."

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In my ignorant way of looking at things, we conceeded too much at the end of World War II, engaged ourselves in Korea - and pulled out. Then down the line a ways, whether for the right reason or the wrong one, we became involved in Vietnam. Time moved on and lo and behold Kuwait was under attack by Iraq - so once again we engaged in battle - supposedly successfully, however our forces kept flying surveillance over Iraq, sanctions imposed and so on.

Then the tragedy of 9/11 occurred. Obviously our administration felt that Iraq had WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION and we just had to go to war. Ignoring the fact that many of our forces were already in Afghanistan.

So, where are we today ? We are overextended in a place where sectarian violence and sinful mistreatment of civilians has been the norm for centuries, are we supposed to be surprised at the escalation ? Guess the onus is on GWB and Cheney now, gonna fall back five and punt ? or fumble again ?

Quite some number of years ago a man put out words of wisdom, which went unheeded. SANTAYANA SAID IT . . . . . . . . . . .

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