To Repeat or Not To Repeat -- History That is.

I was struck by something a couple of weeks ago.  I was reading the first book of John Jakes' trilogy about two families before, during and after the American Civil War, titled North and South.  I first read the book a lot of years ago, mainly because I missed the TV mini-series that was based on the books.  Now I don't know how much research Mr. Jakes did before writing his books but I suspect a fair amount of research went into them.  As I said it has been a lot of years since I first read North and South and I had expected not to remember much of it.  But something surprising happened while I was reading.  I realized that I actually didn't remember much at all but still it seemed to me that I had read the story very recently.

There was something so familiar in what I was reading, but I don't mean familiar because I had read it years before.  No, familiar because I had read the same sorts of things as described in Jakes' book just recently.

Mr. Jakes describes the entrenched attitudes in both the North and the South at the time of the Civil War. How both sides refused to even consider any sort of compromise that might have prevented that war.

Now I'm sure you are way ahead of me here, but I quickly realized why Mr. Jakes story was so familiar.  What he described so well in his book written in 1982, could almost "word for word" be used to describe what I have been reading in the newspapers and hearing on the news and reading in various online news organizations.  The apparent unwillingness of anyone in Washington DC to move away from their entrenched beliefs and try to work out legitimate compromises.

I'm not suggesting anything other then what went through my head when I realized that apparently there is some truth in the old expression from philosopher George Santayana, (1863-1952) “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”