Sometimes moving forward means going back.
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I am not like Miniver Cheevy who believed that the past was better than the future, and treated his present day with contempt. I am actually very grateful for the time in which I have been born. In many ways, life has never been better for me and a great many others, not only here in the United States but around the world.
We have made great social, technological, medical and scientific advancements which enrich and bless all our lives. There may never have been a better time in history for anyone to be born in the United States.
The uninformed might argue that America is a bad place, but race relations, gender equality and economic prosperity have never been better. We still have work to do, but we have come so far. And we ought to congratulate ourselves and all our imperfect predecessors who got us to this point.
But now the baton is in our hands and it’s up to us what we do with it. Sometimes I fear that my generation and the ones proceeding are dithering, fumbling and wandering down some wrong roads.
I think our generation genuinely wants to make progress and that our hearts are generally in the right place. But sometimes if you take a wrong turn, the only way to make progress is to turn around and go back.
You’ll never get to California by heading east from West Virginia. The only way to make it to the pacific coast would be to turn around and start driving back to where we started, then taking the right turn.
Woke-ism and political tribalism are just two of the wrong roads I see us walking down. We will never get to where we want to be walking either of these roads.
Technology also has proven to be a wrong road in many instances, whilst making life convenient technology has destroyed much of the connection we once had, resulting in great loneliness. Loneliness is destructive to the human condition. Social media has made us lazy thinkers, not to mention more anxious, depressed and unkind.
We have come so far. Let us not lose our way wandering down wrong roads. Let us rebuff political tribalism, woke ideology and harmful technology wherever we can. Sometimes we must remember that moving forward means going back until we find where we went wrong and make the needed correction. In some ways, the past was better and we would do well to remember and reapply the best parts of the ‘good old days.’
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