{"id":243819,"date":"2021-12-09T08:44:56","date_gmt":"2021-12-09T16:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/?p=243819"},"modified":"2023-12-05T14:12:47","modified_gmt":"2023-12-05T21:12:47","slug":"learning-from-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/learning-from-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning from history: How this all happened"},"content":{"rendered":"
The older I get, the more interested I am in history.<\/p>\n
When I was young, history and myth seemed to be interchangeable to me. To ten-year-old me, there was little difference between, say, Abraham Lincoln and the Greek gods sitting atop Mount Olympus. All of it was abstract stuff that happened to imaginary people long ago.<\/p>\n
Somewhere along the way \u2014 in my late teens, I think \u2014 history began to seem relevant. During my junior year of college, I took a course on Pacific Northwest history and my eyes were opened. I could see in my own life how events decades ago (or hundreds of years ago or thousands<\/em> of years ago) created the actual world in which I lived my day-to-day existence.<\/p>\n Now that I’m firmly entrenched in middle age, history has never seemed more relevant. <\/p>\n And one of my most common complaints \u2014 a complaint I’m not shy about vocalizing to my poor friends and family \u2014 is that we in the United States seem willfully ignorant of history. We, as a collective, seem to be blind even to recent<\/em> history, to events that have occurred in my lifetime! So much of our modern strife could be mitigated if we, as a society, paid more attention to our past.<\/p>\n Okay, that’s a l-o-n-g<\/em> preamble to a simple article summary. But it’s one of my favorite rants, so I can’t help myself.<\/p>\n