During my foray into history this past year I made some interesting discoveries. It seems like everything that we think is new has been done before.
Whether it’s dealing with the pandemic, taking care of society’s unfortunate, screwing over the poor, using politics for personal gain, or believing in superstitions (aka conspiracy theories).
Here are a few examples that have direct application to current events in the US:
- After the Great London Fire in 1666, wealthy Londoners and business owners looked to the government for relief money to help them rebuild their businesses and properties.
- After the Black Plague killed 100,000 citizens in Florence, the city created a type of widows and orphans fund to Florence take care of families whose men had died.
- The poor are always f****d over. In Ancient Rome, people could be enslaved for debts. In England, the poor lived in overcrowded slums – often renting a portion of a room that cost them all the money they could possibly earn.
- Superstitions, rumors and fear mongering have run rampant through societies from the earliest recorded history. See the Salem Witch Trials, the Catholic Church’s “cures” for the Black Plague, the Inquisition and more.
- The poor people work the hardest. They are used as labor to drive the economy which is run by and for the benefit of the wealthy. From medieval lords ruling over serfs to Roman Citizens relying on slaves to American Plantation owners becoming wealthy off the free labor of Black slaves to Mega-Corporations screwing over their employees today. It never changes.
It’s actually comforting to see that the foibles of today’s society are not new. We’re not better or worse than our predecessors.
So now, when I am confronted by an issue like the government’s response to the Covid pandemic, the War on Terror, the War on Drugs (drug users), private Prisons and Police corruption and more, I try to find something similar in history to see how people will react.
History is often the best predictor of the future.