Just earlier this evening, I had a most elegant and intriguing conversation about the fate of our future. And now I sit here pondering the many peers I had who questioned the relevance of history class while we were growing up.
“It’s just a bunch of useless facts.”
“I won’t remember these people anyways.”
But quite frankly what is the point in studying the past? It is not necessarily all the names and the dates that are important to remember, but the chains of events and the important interactions between people and governance that really matter. In fact, if you looked briefly into the past, it would seem we are repeating the history books yet again. We as humans are quite notorious for not only making mistakes, but making the same mistakes over and over again. Just how many times does it take to learn from a mistake?
Due to my age, President Obama is really the only president that has served during the portions of my life that I can remember. I remember vague glimpses from the former Bush administration, but the Obama administration is the only presidency for which I was old enough to understand. That being said, I personally know very little from personal experience about any presidency besides the Obama administration, and that precisely is why history should be studied. The previous conservative administrations in power before the Obama administration are frankly horrifying compared to the relative docile Obama administration. Obama was not a perfect president; the only sour component was the introduction of Obamacare. Yet the former Reagan and Bush administrations are responsible for the mass incarcerations of many nonviolent criminals, and the loss of countless lives in feeble military conquests.
I may not remember much from previous conservative administrations, but I do know what the books say. President Reagan is responsible for pursuing the war on drugs, and many of the governing policies that send people to prison for simply being a drug user without producing any harm to society itself. Across many European countries and in Canada, prolific drug use is seen as an issue of health and of illness rather than a crime against society. Why should taxpayer money go towards paying for the incarnations of many individuals who have not made a single violent crime? And why were hundreds of thousands of American soldiers sent to Iraq to fight in a war that had no warrant to be started? The strings of conservative administrations preceding President Obama were nothing more but power trips. And the democrats are not all good either; their attempt at mass healthcare only burdens the middle class and is non-functional as a system of national health care coverage. Neither political party is right nor wrong and that is the issue. Our two party system pits each party against each other in a race for power and dominance. And look where it has led us. It looks like our new administration will just be a reciprocal of the past, but with much higher stakes.
The Presidency of Trump will be similar to administrations we have seen in the past. The books do not lie, and it looks like we are in another power trip right now. I’m not sure if it’s the way Trump talks about women, or his denial of climate change that sickens me more. I fear for our environment and the treatment of the people in our nation during the next four years. We sit on a turning point, and we are edging in the wrong direction. We should be seeking progress, but yet we as a nation are still hungry for power. The fact that Trump rallied the majority of voters signifies that as an entity, we have traded our lens of progress, for one of power. Trump is a shimmering image of many of the recent conservative presidents, and that is why history is important. Studying the past reveals all of our mistakes, mishaps, and wrongdoings. But negligence leads to mistake after mistake, after mistake. It is surely a very strange generation that we find ourselves in.
The stakes are only getting higher and the time is only getting shorter. I hope that maybe this time people will look back on our mistakes and learn to correct them instead of neglecting them.
