As the present now will later be past

True, the times do change.

Change is the only constant, the only thing you can really count on. Yet this week I've been struck again and again at how "we" continually deal with the same "issues"... over and over again.

Forget about repetition compulsion. I can't even begin to deal with that here.

What seems to keep cropping up for me are those endless and endlessly prescient warnings from the past of a future that's doomed (today?)

We look to the past for validation that the problems we face now were somehow foreseen by someone smarter than we are, or maybe someone who's more respected than "we"--the ever maligned left--are.

So we have Eisenhower warning us about the evils of the military industrial complex. We have Jefferson warning us about the concentration of corporate power. We have Orwell, Atwood, Huxley with their dystopic literary visions (many of which, by the way, have been banned by many a public school). And we have others coming along later and commenting on said dystopic visions.

...all this to demonstrate the seriousness and urgency of tomorrow's problems today (or today's problems for tomorrow).

But if we were doomed in the future yesterday by the same problems we're facing today (and faced yesterday)... doesn't that mean we can just blow it all off because in 50-100 years, there will be people looking back and saying how prescient we were to predict tomorrow's problems yesterday (today?)

Ummm, no.

Instead, I think we should pay more attention to the countless anonymous people who kept the fight going in between times, because without them, yesterday's predictions of doom might have been fulfilled. Instead, we have the opportunity to carry on. And hopefully, the sun will come up, and we can start again.