The Price of Liberty

… are doomed to repeat it.

The original version of this statement is attributed to George Santayana, an American philosopher. The exact quote is “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” from his work, The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense.

Sadly, it seems as those who are most able to apply this principle are the enemies of liberty, here in the Fifty States. (And around the world.)

We see this today or a regular basis. The so-called “uprising” on 6 January 2021, led by the evil monster in the White House, is a more important (nd feared) milestone in American history than… (take your pick) Bloody Tuesday (9-11), Pearl Harbor, or whatever. The enemies of freedom, of liberty, of decency can get away with this because the vast mass of the people have forgotten even recent history. Much less a century or two or three ago.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that they have never been taught real history. (It is easy to “forget” what you never learned.) For years and years, less and less accurate history has been taught in primary and secondary educational institutions – and even less in the so-called institutions of higher learning. And what has been taught is denigrated as “history of dead while men” and condemned as elitist, exist, racist, colonialist, and more. More and more people believe the propaganda taught as “history.”

So we find ourselves, as communities and States and nations, taking that path of which Santayana warned: condemned or doomed to repeat our history – especially the mistakes.

This morning there was an example of how this works, from Montrose, Colorado.