Past, Present, and Post-Present

I love history. I love it so much I'm almost an addict. I'm interested in any part of history, and I appreciate the value of history. History is incredibly important because it teaches us how we got to where we are today, and it sheds light onto where we're going tomorrow. Yes, I love history and rightfully so, it's an important and enlightening subject.

I fear that too many of my fellow Americans value history even more than I do. In fact some Americans love history so much that they're trying to live in the past rather than use it as a guide to our future.

Take, for example, the Tea Party, a group whose name harkens back to the Boston Tea Party. The Tea Party, along with many other far right wingers, wants to return us to the good ole days when there was actually a militia that actually needed weapons, and when people responded to unjust taxes by dumping the goods of private individuals into Boston Harbor. These people want us to live in a world that ignores modern problems like assault weapons and global warming. They want to apply verbatim a document written over 200 years ago to the world today. If the Constitution doesn't address airplanes, machine guns and an increasingly hot world, then we may as well brush them under the carpet. If it ain't in the Constitution, these people lack the intellect, creativity, and fortitude to deal with it. We need to apply the Constitution to the modern world, not try to conform the modern world to the Constitution.

This would be an excellent approach to things if it were 1810 instead of 2010. Let's make America better today and use the past as a guidebook rather than attempting to conform to it. After all, how much fun would it be if everywhere you went was like Colonial Williamsburg?