We Can Learn From The Past To Strike Back At Our Biggest Problems In The World

Remember when you were young and in school. Think about the lessons your teachers, instructors, and professors tried to teach you. Whether you were a studious youngster or the wildest of boys and girls, you probably remember someone that taught you much of what you learned in school. Perhaps you even had a favorite teacher, someone you look back on fondly and wish you’d listened to more when they spoke. What we’ve all grown up to learn is that our favorite teachers weren’t our best teachers at all.

History is our best teacher. What we can learn from history will guide us into tomorrow. So, with that in mind, the things of today become the lessons of tomorrow. We are all learning today and have been for the past couple of years. What today will teach the generations in front of us will be an entirely different lesson and one that we hope they learn.

Learning

Every generation has its’ differences. Children born just 20 years apart seem to come from entirely different worlds. Our exposures to events, crises, and things that are a part of the natural order shape who we become. The one constant in the learning process that affects every generation the same way is that they don’t learn from history. History is our best teacher, particularly concerning what we’ve done as a species. Yet every generation forgets what we have learned already, or they ignore our history.

Learning is acquiring knowledge or skills gained from studying, being taught, or through experience.

— Dictionary.com

Alpha personalities, or type-A personalities, want to forge their paths. They wish to follow no one. Type-A personalities are hardworking, never satisfied with what they have, or willing to settle. The world’s leaders are usually type-A personalities.

Then, there are type-B personalities. Type-B personalities aren’t aggressive, aren’t as ambitious, and find simpler lives appealing. Type-B people aren’t seeking power. They seek peace, tranquility, and hope for prosperity.

Something both personality types have in common is not learning from history. They both fail to remember what came before them. They both fail to apply the knowledge taught by history. We are seeing that now on the world stage. As we see things play out on the world stage in the current era, what are the lessons that we hope people take into the future? Hopefully, they’ll be lessons to deal with the two biggest problems the entire world is faced with.

1. Global Warming

2. Threat Of War

Learning From History

The image above is of Earths’ Blackbox, or at least, what it may appear as when completed.

The Earths’ Blackbox is being built in Tasmania this year. This is an ambitious undertaking that involves multiple organizations. They’re designing it to record our lives, our roads forward, and to study how we got to where we are. But, it has another purpose, this virtually indestructible box.

When I first found this, I questioned the need for such a device. A black box is, after all, for someone to have a recording of what went desperately wrong. Each time a plane goes down, the black box holds the answers to what happened. Why I asked, would we need a planetary black box? Then, in entered 2022 to demonstrate why it was something we needed.

So far, in 2022, we have seen several close flybys of giant asteroids. Whether you think such a thing is possible or not, the asteroids out there pose a real threat to humanity. Yesterday, at a safe range, an asteroid flew through Earths’ orbit that was nearly one mile wide. Imagine if it had struck the Earth. An asteroid far smaller could kill millions if it struck the right location on Earth.

A series of potentially damaging storms is about to blow through the central portion of the United States. Each year our storms become more devastating than the previous years. This year, it’s estimated that as much as fifty billion in damages will occur from storms.

Now, on top of global warming, climate emergencies, rampant inflation from the post-Covid era, and prices of oil hitting all of us, we also have another war to contend with. War, again the people of this world prove that they are too petty and divided not to plunge the world into chaos. We are back at the brink of our destruction, and there appears to be little way of escaping the circumstances.

What, if anything, can be learned from these events? Can we leave a message to future generations that the Earth is a fragile place to call home? Perhaps, just perhaps, future generations will not continue to treat the planet like a dumping ground.

We all know that certain habits need to change. Some of us may have been guilty of these habits our entire lives. While you may not think there is much that you can do there are nearly 8 billion people on Earth, and if all of us were to commit to only one action leading in a better direction, we’d be doing something huge. If we don’t, then the Earths’ Blackbox is going to be needed sooner than later.

Applying Lessons Learned

Oil right now is something that sits at the heart of anything you might consider. If you’re considering prices, look to oil. If you consider gas prices, look definitely to oil. If you consider the war in Ukraine, consider oil. There is something we can do, but I’ll get to that.

While the barrel of oil continues to exert control over our daily lives and our President refuses to return us to a course of energy independence while we await the country to catch up with the rest of the world, we can do something about how much petroleum we consume.

The production of single-use plastic bags begins with a polymer. Polyethylene, the most commonly used polymer for fabricating plastic bags, comes from a long chain of ethylene monomers, which is the primary ingredient in the polymerization reaction. Polyethylene includes the reaction of ethylene molecules in the presence of a catalyst to break the double bond of the carbon molecule.

The raw material for making plastic comes from oil or gas production. To get the pure polyethylene, oil or gas is superheated and pressurized, which separates the polyethylene chain.

As we’ve all come to learn, our environment is in danger. Our climates are shifting, and become more unstable with each passing year. This is a lesson we started learning in the 1980s. Still, it’s 2022, and people aren’t applying the lessons they’ve learned. People still utilize single-use plastic bags and other single-use plastics to the tune of 130 million tons a year. In America, this breaks down to just shy of 43 billion pounds of single-use plastic and only about 8 percent of this gets recycled in the United States.

They say that gas prices are so high due to the supply and demand of oil. What if there was less need to use oil to make single-use plastics, like shopping bags?

While oil companies every year post record profits, they do very little to ensure the environment is being watched after. We do far less than we should to be certain that it’s safe for future generations. Exxon Mobil continues to be an extremely profitable company due to the burning of their gas in our engines, but they’re one of the biggest manufacturers of single-use plastic. For just a few bucks, you could replace the use of single-use plastic bags at grocery stores, WalMarts, and Targets around the country.

Lessons Leaders Should Learn

While some people never learn, there are lessons that our leaders should learn. Vladimir Putin is one of those people that seems to have forgotten lessons of the past. His invasion of Ukraine has taught us all that fact.

Putin's been rattling his saber, or rather his nuclear football. We all learned from the first time that nuclear weapons were used, that in the event of a nuclear war there were no winners. Putin continues to rattle his sword in Russia, keeping the rest of the world on the edge of their seats, and an entire generation on the edge of nuclear armageddon.

Not since the end of the cold war has the world had as much to be afraid of as we all have today. The war in Ukraine is an exercise in futility that has affected us all. We all have a bottom line, and we all have those that we love. We care about our loved ones and our bottom lines. After those two considerations, we simply want to live out our lives in peace.

People of Earth need to learn that at the end of the day, despite our different beliefs, different religions, and different countries, we are all sharing one world and what happens on one side of the planet affects us all. Only when this is learned will the human race stand a chance of realizing its’ full potential. But, as Vladimir Putin and his Russian friends continue to get rich exporting oil and natural gas from Russia, we can put a dent in their immense wealth over time by simply avoiding single-use plastics.

Final Thoughts

There is so much going on in the world right now and we should, in pretense, be celebrating. For the first time in two years, it appears that the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic is over. It’s 65 degrees in the 61401 zip code. Spring is in the air. Yet, when I made my weekly shopping trip I saw that nothing has changed. We are expecting damaging thunderstorms, high winds, hail, and possible tornadoes from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. and I know that the storms this year will be worse than last. Still, even with gas prices at $4.19 today, the highest they’ve ever hit, nobody is slowing down. People continue to guzzle up gallon after gallon of gas, filling the pockets of people that make the single-use grocery bag that takes five years to fifty years to biodegrade.

Everywhere we look, there are lessons to be learned, and nobody is applying them in life. Perhaps it’s going to take something drastic to get people to wake up. The sooner we collectively break free from the Matrix, and in one collective voice, scream “It’s time to change,” then the sooner our leaders have to listen. Until then, we have to affect change ourselves. We have to start helping people in the world instead of going around them. We have to start lifting more and more people in the world, instead of only focusing on ourselves. Most importantly, we have to listen to those that came before us and share their wisdom with our youth.

We can’t do much about what our leaders do. But, we can strike back at them where it hurts. Putin sells oil and natural gas with his buddies. Everything we do that stops us from using products dependent on oil and natural gas for production stikes back at Putin and the Russian War machine.

For our biggest lesson of the last ten days, one we hoped our leaders would have learned by now, I leave you with the words of Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong…

“(War) h’uh

Yeah!

(What is it good for?)

Absolutely (nothin) uh-huh, uh-huh

Say it again, y’all