Waking Up All Over Again

One writer calls it Presentism. Another, "an indiscriminate rejection of the past".

"Presentism” is the practice of applying 2020 cultural expectations and values to some 18th- or 19th-century events we’d rather forget. “Presentism” is comfortable because it encourages a kind of morally superior self-congratulation by interpreting the past as it suits us.

Denial of the past would mean that the truth of the country’s history becomes something best forgotten in the interests of generational comfort.

There is an increasing tendency to prefer that such and thus events in the past just did not happen and if it did, like Dorothy, we could cause it to simply disappear by wishing it away.

But pulling down statues and changing building and street names and references to the past for better or worse is regarded by many, including the Irish side of my family, as a perilous path.

The writer concludes with a quote:

In terms of setting aside the distasteful events of the past by removing statues and the names of buildings, Alex Haley wrote: “Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.”

Continue reading: here.

The next writer speaks about the virtue of piety, the loss thereof and the consequences.

We all sense that the current crisis in our nation is more than just a passing bit of social unrest. The anger legitimately directed at racism and police brutality has somehow morphed into an indiscriminate rejection of the past, a desire to sever us from all that came before. Thus the vandalism and toppling of statues of the Founding Fathers, Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant – and Stevie Ray Vaughn (is nothing sacred?!).

This renunciation might seem all-of-a-sudden to many people. In fact, it’s been prepared for years by bad education and, even more, the erosion and weakening of that foundational virtue, piety.

By piety I mean reverence for the people, wisdom, principles, and institutions that precede us and have shaped who we are. Piety looks to our parents: Honor your father and your mother. It extends to our community, town, and country. Most of all it looks to God – to the Source of all life and good. And this looking back to sources contains a blessing for the future: Honor your father and your mother, that you may have a long life in the land the Lord your God is giving you. (Ex 20:12)

Piety is the virtue that inclines us to receive instruction from those who have gone before us. We regard them as having some wisdom to teach us, not only about this world but the next. Piety disposes us to be taught.

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2020/07/05/the-impious-public-square/ 

The Jehovah's Witnesses' Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society must be sorely miffed by the appropriation of their agenda. Its own way way of doing revisionist history (e.g., Awake! magazine), has been colonized, if you will, by the woke crew, without retaining the accompanying cartoonish sugary images and dystopian commentary. Ok, well... there is a dystopian commentary common to both approaches. Perhaps those two communities can get together and work out who gets to decide the version of history the rest of us must believe in order to better fit into the new norm, or whatever.