HISTORY is NOT a CLOCK to be RESET

HISTORY is NOT a CLOCK to be RESET

Spring forward, fall back ... the easy way to remember the changes for daylight savings time. I much prefer the fall back change. I enjoy the illusion of having an hour to live over again. 'Tis a shame I must give it back every spring because I like the way we pass the time in the Nashville area. Compared to other places I have been, we are more relaxed here, and if I may indulge in a bit of hometown conceit, much more gracious.

But no matter how we manipulate our timepieces, the days go by as rapidly as ever, their inexorable changes upon our bodies confirmed by the faces in our mirrors.

Change is the fundamental principle of the universe: nothing is permanent.

All living things die, mountains erode, and eventually the sun will expand into a red giant star until it incinerates our Earth. And the irrevocable fact is once something has fundamentally changed, no amount of longing for it as it once was can reverse the march of time.

We should strive to preserve the best of what survives. But we cannot bring back that whose time has passed.

Yet, throughout recorded time, many strident conservatives have failed to realize history is not a clock that can be reset to accommodate their ideology. Much of history is a violent chronicle of the failures of reactionary conservatives. The greater their efforts have been to resist change, the greater the diminishment of what they sought to preserve. I know of no conservative institutional retrenchment effort which has succeeded in the long run.

Consider only a few of many historical examples:

*** If you are a Protestant here on the buckle of the Bible Belt, you are living proof of the failure of conservative reaction. The pagan Roman Empire tried to eradicate Christianity because the new cult was a threat to the established regime whose emperor was proclaimed to be divine, a divinity the Christians denied, such denial constituting the highest of treasons. End result: The Empire's capitol city became the center of the Catholic Church which would define Western Civilization for a thousand years.

But the Church of Rome's own subsequent conservative reaction to calls for internal reform eventually cost it half of Christendom via the Protestant Reformation. Christianity as a whole and Protestantism in particular exist today despite conservative attempts of the old regimes to suppress them.

*** The creation of the United States was the direct result of the failure of the British government's conservative colonial policy. Had the British Parliament been more liberal and open-minded to the petitions of its American colonies, we might still be loyal subjects of the British Crown.

The very language of the Declaration of Independence reveals it to be a lament of the last resort.

*** The Confederacy was a catastrophic failure of conservatism. The South still reaps the bitter fruits of its seduction by a doctrine of States Rights and Secession that promised relief from Federal intervention upon its slavery-based agricultural economic system. But secession delivered only the destruction of the very way of life it sought to preserve.

The conservative philosophy of States Rights and Secession was also the primary cause of increased concentration of power in the Federal government, the very antithesis of states rights doctrine. Without the need to coordinate a massive war effort to preserve the Union, the central government would have not introduced the first income tax nor so rapidly acquired the ability to direct the entire nation's focus and expenditure of its treasure.

The Confederacy failed on all counts at the cost of a half million American lives and the decimation of the Southern states. Only the individual acts of valor and courage from the Civil War deserve our reverence and respect, and certainly no reverence or romantic nostalgia should be extended to the memory of "The Cause" which included keeping millions of human beings in brutal slavery.


*** In 1919, conservative activists did manage to change the Constitution. But they could not turn back the clock to eliminate a personal choice that the people had long claimed as theirs alone. Prohibition's 18th Amendment was an utter failure. It also fertilized the seeds of organized crime via the bootlegging industry.

Remember this if you think the established practice of a woman's control over her body's reproductive capability can simply be legislated away.

*** The onus for the decline of neighborhood schools clearly falls upon the conservative opposition to simple desegregation. Rather than simply allow all students in the existing zones to attend the same schools, the tired old doctrine of States Rights was trotted out again to defend the morally bankrupt policy of state mandated racial segregation.

All those years of conservative legal arena resistance to desegregation were the catalysts that caused court-mandated busing as an imposed solution in the face of conservative persistent non-compliance with Brown v. Topeka Board of Education.

Conservative reaction to change once again failed to maintain the staus quo, offered no viable alternative, and caused busing of students with its ensuing huge impersonal comprehensive high schools which have no connection to any particular community.

In conclusion, it may be more comfortable to look into the past rather than forward into the unknown. But we do have some measure of control over the future if we act wisely in the present with our vision focused beyond the next earnings reports from Wall Street and not distorted by a sanitized rememberance of the way things used to be.  Contemporary conservative efforts, often buttressed by a fundamentalist Christian theology, seek to deny established scientific facts about the origin of the universe and the evolution of life on our planet, they seek to suppress women as individuals with full rights from control of their own bodies to receiving equal pay for equal work, they seek to deny the full rights of personhood to LGBT people, they are perverting the right to keep and bear arms into what is essentially a cult of gun worship, and many adhere to an ecomonic philosophy, supply side trickle down, which has never been proven to work and has amassed immense increases in public debt ,,, these are  basically the positions of the Fox News propaganda machine.  The most dangerous trend threatening American exceptionalism is these conservatives' blatant disrespect of science and its experts, the fact of climate change being the most notable and perilous for all our futures.    Although they have succeeded in the short term stagnation of the Federal Congress and hurling many state legislatures back into the 19th century, history shows these conservative attempts will fail in the long term just as have all conservative attempts to revise the facts of history and to turn back the clock of progress.

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