No Past, No Future

Managed to squeeze in the last rendition of the Time Machine this week.  It was nowhere the movie that the 1960s (?) version was - which I still have not found amongst my boxes!  But, it was an okay movie - it just has no real strong points to it.  What I liked about the earlier version was the scientist returning and taking five books with him back into the future.  The obvious question being - which five would you take?  Hint: I doubt Mein Kampf or Karl Marx would have been found in that group.....

But, there was one actually good line in the movie that I do not remember from the book or the old version:  "Having no appreciation of their past, they had no interest in their future....."

Yeah an interesting line in an age when history has no known relevance to what is happening today or tomorrow - because no one actually has bothered to understand in this generation that history is an accurate predictor of the future.  Don't know your past?  You will honestly believe that the future truly is random.....  It doesn't take a genius to know this one!

So, I thought about Jesus versus the establishment.  He told them what was going to happen (Matthew 12:39), he told them to know their history so they could understand, and they not only did not understand their history, nor what He told them, they killed him just to prove His point!  And then could not connect the dots. 

Eventually, I think enough people did because when Trajan attacked - the Jewish Christians fled the walls of Jerusalem - per Josephius.  Yeah, they knew their Matthew writings by then it seems.

And what of this generation?  I have heard some mighty interesting conversations this week where people have completely confused their history.  No these are not teenagers!  These are adults not sure where WWI was fought, much less that the Civil War was not about slavery and no treaty was signed in Versailles concerning it!  More woeful, was not even knowing Kuwait was a country attacked by Iraq and we counter attacked for Saudi Arabia at their request.

So, this generation will not know or understand what happened in the Falkland Islands or Grenada and have learned any lessons from it.  They do understand the Yom Kippur war and what caused it - other than Jewish aggression!  The Cold War means nothing, the deaths of 100,000,000 in the last century means even less - it has not happened in this generations timeline!  So, I guess it must not be important since J Lo was not involved!

Yup, western culture is ripe for destruction - we have earned it.

Just as a sort of doomsday reading material list: put away a copy of the Bible with Matthew 24 book marked, a copy of Julius Ceasar's Wars, Backpacking One Step At A Time and the FoxFire series of books.  You just might want something useful to read while civilization crumbles.  But, then again, if your knowledge of the world comes from Us or People, then perhaps the lack of pictures will put you to sleep.....