Learning from our past mistakes helps prevent future catastrophes
Brian Ault
I guess it’s because I’m a senior and I can see the future on the horizon. For roughly the past year or so, heightened a little by the current economic crisis in this country, I’ve been wondering what exactly we will think of ourselves and what we’ve done the past eight years in this country.
Will we scrap around for rationale as to why we stood silent on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or the slamming of the Constitution with a sledgehammer by this administration?
Will we try to burn every inch of proof that these eight years actually happened and claim amnesia?
Or maybe we’ll actually come to terms with our sins and just try to do better next time.
Recent history has told us that we gravitate toward the amnesia option more than anything else.
Take the country’s response after the crippling Watergate scandal, for example.
We became distrustful of federal government.
We slid into a recession and a gas crisis, and we spent the ‘80s drunk and coked out of our minds.
All the while, we forgot the main lesson that should have been learned from Watergate—that the imperial presidency should be seen as nothing more than a joke and anyone who believes in it shouldn’t be allowed to hold a public office of any sort.
However, there have been other times in our history where we have looked at the sins of our past and done our best to never do them again.
For instance, as the country was finally beginning to get out of the Great Depression under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, policies were passed in Congress that dealt with the lax regulation standards in banking to prevent the crash from happening again.
After World War II, the lessons of the allies in World War I were still prominent.
The Treaty of Versailles placed fault for WWI on Germany and punished them with enormous war reparations that paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler during WWII.
After WWII, policies like the Marshall Plan were enacted to rebuild the European infrastructure and entities like the United Nations were created to keep the peace.
Of course, you may argue the U.N.’s success since its creation, but it was an attempt to make up for the mistakes of the Treaty of Versailles.
These three scenarios each provide a path that we can follow in the future when we look back at the chaos that is the Bush presidency.
Where we go from here and how we avoid making past mistakes is paramount for our success or even downfall as a country.
Now that I’ve inadvertently blown your mind, I’ll leave you with a Bush comment, in celebration of his last days in office.
In regards to the crumbling economy, Bush said back in July of this year, obviously unaware that he was being recorded: “There’s no question about it. Wall Street got drunk — that’s one of the reasons I asked you to turn off the TV cameras. It got drunk and now it’s got a hangover. The question is how long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments.”
Brian Ault is a columnist for The Nevada Sagebrush. He can be reached at editor@nevadasagebrush.com
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