As I delve more and more into history, I am continuously astonished (I probably shouldn't be by now, haha) by the realization that history may not exactly REPEAT itself but, it sure does RHYME. After all, where else can a nation look to for guidance but in its own memorable history or other nations' histories, for that matter, in attempt to learn from or avoid making the same mistakes in future? Is that not the whole idea? Our duty to create a better future? How will posterity judge us? If history is a nation's memory, then America has national Alzheimer's. Pulitzer Prize winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in an op-ed titled "Folly's Antidote" (The New York Times, January 1, 2007): History is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its presen...
pragmatism | /ˈpraɡməˌtizəm/ : a philosophical approach based on the principle that the usefulness, workability, and practicality of ideas, policies, and proposals are the criteria of their merit. It stresses the priority of action over doctrine, of experience over fixed principles, and it holds that ideas borrow their meanings from their consequences and their truths from their verification.