Sir Basil Hudson-Landry
Historians - we have the last say (again and and again and again--every time another revisionist comes along)
This was from a Father's Day letter to his (Holt's) two grandsons. It was included in a segment on NBC fathers' greetings and wishes to the their kids aired on the Friday before Father's Day, but I was working on Our Lady of No Negative Waves at the time, so just started this one a few days ago and just finished yesterday.
I think he is right.
As hard as it may be to believe, with all the bad news now, the news has always been bad, the Good Ol' Days have only seemed good in retrospect because we choose, consciously or otherwise, to remember the good and forget (or at least minimize) the bad, and I think the course of human history has always been toward a better world.
Our wars of the 20th Centuray and those of today, as horrible as they were and are are, weren't/aren't as bad as the Thirty Years War and the Crusades, etc., and certainly not as bad as the genocidal atrocities depicted in the Old Testament and other ancient history, and the same is true of all other aspects of life.
Even if we're headed toward environmental disaster, at least now, unlike in the past, there are people, huge numbers of them, who acknowledge there IS a problem and are working to fix it, and even if we fail to do so in time, if we bend the laws of nature so far they spring back and bust our ass, I believe we'll pick up the pieces, start again, and move on to a better world than before.
Otherwise, we might as well just admit it's all a pointless joke and blow our f-----g brains out.
Historians - we have the last say (again and and again and again--every time another revisionist comes along)
This was from a Father's Day letter to his (Holt's) two grandsons. It was included in a segment on NBC fathers' greetings and wishes to the their kids aired on the Friday before Father's Day, but I was working on Our Lady of No Negative Waves at the time, so just started this one a few days ago and just finished yesterday.
I think he is right.
As hard as it may be to believe, with all the bad news now, the news has always been bad, the Good Ol' Days have only seemed good in retrospect because we choose, consciously or otherwise, to remember the good and forget (or at least minimize) the bad, and I think the course of human history has always been toward a better world.
Our wars of the 20th Centuray and those of today, as horrible as they were and are are, weren't/aren't as bad as the Thirty Years War and the Crusades, etc., and certainly not as bad as the genocidal atrocities depicted in the Old Testament and other ancient history, and the same is true of all other aspects of life.
Even if we're headed toward environmental disaster, at least now, unlike in the past, there are people, huge numbers of them, who acknowledge there IS a problem and are working to fix it, and even if we fail to do so in time, if we bend the laws of nature so far they spring back and bust our ass, I believe we'll pick up the pieces, start again, and move on to a better world than before.
Otherwise, we might as well just admit it's all a pointless joke and blow our f-----g brains out.