In our solipsistic age, few recognize either the debt owed the past or the responsibility to posterity. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective:
If you could go back in time a thousand years, you’d find people who were eerily similar to your present companions. The same is true for people who will live a thousand years from now. Some of them will be nearly identical to the people you now love, and you would care deeply about those people, the same as you do their present-day counterparts.
Please understand this: The men, women and children we would love in the future can advance only in the same way we have, by the benefaction of their predecessors.
Can you imagine how long it took for ignorant men and women to learn metallurgy? Or crop rotation? Or a hundred other things we can barely imagine being without? Our lives are advanced only because they created new ways of living and passed them down to us. Hundreds of generations of people just like us lived through dark times, fighting toward whatever bits of light they could find, opposed by others nearly the entire way, to bring us where we are now.
Someday our generation will also be gone, and we will have played – whether we’ve understood it or not – the crucial role of transmitting civilization to following generations. What do we want them to be like? How do we want them to live?
Numberless men and women have struggled toward the future and spent all they had to bring us here. We owe them something. It may be that they no longer care, but their gifts to us will cease to exist unless we pass them along. We make them matter, and they deserve to matter.
We stand now at the threshold of the stars, but we’ve been immobilized by self-serving structures designed to control every human and reap from their every action. We must get past them if we are to continue forward.
Foolishness and fear bid us to forget the future, to chase status instead of goodness, consumption rather than production, and stasis rather than expansion. A thousand self-serving voices call us aside, grasping at our minds and emotions. We must turn away from them all.
Fear is really all the controllers have but it is so hard to help people get over it.
Only an ICU disaster and wild scary visions got me over it.
Thank You God.
I used to love those cut away view books as a child where it would show a castle or village from long ago and you could look in like Superman or the old pop-up and scratch n’ sniff books!
Parents used to have a gigantor Civil War book made of a tapestry like material which was just amazing and told the whole story, they dealt antiques on weekend and sadly it was sold.