- Today is a new day…..I will try my best to find myself within it. I may feel lost and misguided at times, but there is absolutely no shame in that. I will just shove this carbon-based, clumsily biped conveyance into “Drive” and thence never once look back. The past consists entirely of memories, some good but not all, while the present and future hold the potential for creating memories majorly superior to the ones currently existing in my cerebral vaults. I therefore intend to mine the present and hopefully the future as well–should my aureate luck hold out indefinitely–for twenty-four-carat memories that’ll put everything presently residing in my Memory Hall of Fame to shame. “Make America Great Again!”??? It’s already great, as is the rest of our world and our universe. Nothing is more irksome than hearing some red-faced oldster snarling at length about how we must pull together to make the world that we live in “great again”, when obviously by dint of their age alone they must have been an integral party to its alleged downfall, whenever that degeneration supposedly happened. If ya ain’t part of the solution then you’re part of the problem, and grumpy old dinosaurs who insist on pointing to the past as the seminal roadmap that we should utilize for navigating the tricky byways up ahead egregiously miss this point. Cavemen did not persevere and ultimately prevail by turning their backs on fire, their successors did not persevere and prevail by turning their backs on the wheel, people of the middle ages did not persevere and prevail by turning their backs on the printing press, the descendants who followed them did not persevere and prevail by turning their backs on the internal combustion engine, their successors did not persevere and prevail by eschewing their yearning to fly not unlike the birds in the sky—first within the bounds of our earthly atmosphere and much later breathtakingly beyond those bounds—and our most recent ancestors did not persevere and prevail by ignoring the magisterial power inherent to the splitting of the atom. Why should we be any different or, more appropriately–why would we WANT to be any different–than any of our predecessors extending all the way back to the troglodyte era? Make America great again??? It has always been great, just as the history and culture of mankind has sought greatness ever since we became bipedal creatures and migrated en masse out of eastern Africa eons ago. That greatness has never been defined by looking backwards during times of need, during times of strife, during times of volatility, during times of trouble. No, human greatness has always been defined by how we react to adversity by looking and moving FORWARD, not backwards. The future holds the innovative solutions for the new problems we humans constantly seem to create and stumble into without trying; the past only holds the reasons and root causes for those same problems. Seeking to rectify current problems with old “solutions” will only exacerbate those problems and make them more intractable and long-lasting. You can never be the solution to a problem which you admittedly caused yourself. If a major problem germinated and subsequently exploded skyward and thrived during your watch, then that is YOUR problem and not to be blamed on succeeding generations. At that juncture, just graciously step aside and allow younger, more mentally nimble people to clean up the mess you were largely responsible for creating. That is the proper thing to do, that is the logical thing to do, that is the moral thing to do…..that is the RIGHT thing to do! To do otherwise–to stand red-faced in the middle of the road with the veins in the temples of your skull dangerously distended, all outraged and disgruntled and unreasonably opinionated while chanting hypnotically about the need to make our world “great” again–is not just grossly immature behavior and a heinous reflection on an entire generation. It is, rather, just about the most selfish, tantrum-throwing behavior any human being of any generation could ever engage in. Shame shame shame on you if you find yourself falling within such a misguided subset! Your descendants–your DNA bearers, your flesh and blood reincarnated, your legacy namesakes–deserve better even if you personally do not.
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Fred's Soapbox 