Looking To The Past To See The Future ã

In this day when there are many people saying that they can see the future for a price, there is one certain source for foretelling the future. This psychic cannot be reached at any phone number and does not charge for guidance. This predictor of the future is history.

Does history really repeat itself? I do not know about others, but I had always been told that we had to study and learn from history so we would not make the same mistakes as those in the past.

Why do we so easily forget to look back?

The worse thing for society is that there is a maxim that is apparently true.

Why look to the stars, cards, numbers, some dead entity or someone who claims visions to look ahead. Even Nostradamus has never turned out to be as good an indicator as history for seeing what is coming before it happens. How many times have people attempted to use Nostradamus to predict disaster in L.A. only to meet disappointment.

The passage of time has been consistent. Take away the dates, boundaries and the technology and you will find one era after another following the same patterns. Isn't that why specialist on a country or area of the world must be intimately familiar with the history?

What horrors of history could have been avoided had we only paid attention to the lessons of history? Could we have seen what was happening in Germany in Hitler's rise to power? Could we have seen that passification could never have worked? Could we have seen the spread of the soviet empire after World War II? Could the reunification of Germany and the fall of the USSR have been predicted?

I will leave it to the historians to explain the repeative patterns that have occurred. I wish to look ahead while remembering the past. Can we even just look back to World War II and begin to see what changes will occure after the turn of the century?

Last revised: December 12, 1999

By George William Sweeney