Teach your children well

Our friend the White Trash Republican left a comment on my post about the current state of affairs which contained this thought:

One bright spot- Everyday has now become "a teachable moment" for my younguns, but so sad they are having to witness this.

I agree, but we must be careful to learn all the lessons the past has to teach us or we risk falling into the same errors again.

Let us never forget that the "Greatest Generation" who survived the Great Depression and defeated Hitler and the Empire of Japan also made colossal and ruinously expensive mistakes, some of which are with us to this very day.

Let us remember that it was this very generation which elected FDR and demanded the passage of his New Deal which turned a serious recession into a Great Depression. It was the "Greatest Generation" who gave us the Social Security Ponzi scheme which will bankrupt the federal government within the lifetime of most of the people reading this post (if it isn't already bankrupt).

We should also keep in mind that the Greatest Generation's determination to stay out of another European war led America to stand passively on the sidelines while Hitler rose to power. It caused America to join England and France in inaction when Hitler broke the Treaty of Versailles, which America was a signatory to and had as much right and responsibility to enforce as any other nation, and rearmed the Rhineland. This cowardly determination to avoid another war caused the civilized nations of the world to throw away their last chance to stop the Nazis while it could still be done easily and cheaply and set up every grim and terrible event to follow.

America's current situation has some striking similarities to its circumstances in the years preceding WWII. The nation is facing economic hard times and the government's solution is to ram through a massive program which will do almost nothing to solve our economic troubles but will push the nation hard and far to the left. It seems that not an hour goes by without someone discovering some new bit of stealth socialism which has been crammed into this massive piece of legislation. The latest being socialized medicine (full story here) which will ration health care in the US and bring us to the point of practicing euthanasia by neglect by denying treatment to those deemed "too old" or who otherwise fail a cost/benefit analysis designed to determine whether their lives are worth the cost of treating them.

[Note to any young diabetic. Make sure you go to college and study something the state will consider to be an essential skill so that you can earn enough National Ministry of Health "life value points" to justify your insulin ration.]

We are currently fighting a war in Iraq which the majority of the population feels was a mistake and which the current president campaigned against. This once again sets the nation up to stand by while madmen (in this case the Iranian mullahs) become an international threat (in this case by acquiring nuclear bombs).

It does seem that we are poised to repeat the dreadful errors of the past. Once again the government is responding to economic difficulty by legislation which will make the economy worse but will grow the size and scope of the federal government. Once again we are experiencing an upsurge of isolationist sentiment at exactly the point in history when interventionism would prevent a future holocaust. Once again American politics at the highest level has degenerated into a sordid personality cult which has accorded semi-divine status to a demagogue whose only real talent is telling the people want they want to hear.

It would seem that too many of the current generation of adults have failed to learn from the errors of the past and are therefore doomed to repeat them in the present. Perhaps if we are diligent to explain to our young ones what mistakes are currently being made, and exactly why they are mistakes, while the tragedy is unfolding before their eyes they will truly learn the lessons.

And then, perhaps, they will be able to construct something enduring upon the rubble of America's first failed experiment in self government.