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Hello, friends. Thanks for joining me here today.

Please indulge me a bit of a history perspective. That is, what we can learn from history, and what we don’t seem to learn. The good and the bad, to oversimplify.

We certainly can expect that humankind will continue – let us hope – to come up with positive advances in treatment, cures, and prevention of diseases.

The flip side is that we can expect negative advances in ways and means of killing one another too. Sad but true.

I could probably continue with at least a few more of those positive-negative examples.

There is one thing, it seems to me, that doesn’t change, doesn’t fit this good-bad paradigm.

That being, we, our species, has never, ever seemed to exist with one another peacefully very long at a time.

Humankind just doesn’t seem to learn how to do that. Such a dilemma seems insoluble.

Why is this, you may ask.

The answer to that I do not have. It’s just a “what is.” Maybe the creator of this world intended it to be so. Blaming God, somehow, doesn’t seem right. Makes one uneasy to even contemplate such a conundrum. This is the same God that bequeathed us the capacity to love.

Those with strong religious beliefs, and not just Christians, probably don’t wrestle with such questions. They know what they believe is right, and beliefs to the contrary are wrong. Religious superiority, some might call it. I’ll leave the labeling to others.

To some extent, to a great extent probably, the well known quote “The only lesson history has taught us is that man has not learned anything from history” is subscribed to by many.

If it were up to me, I would prefer “One lesson history has taught us is that man has not learned some things from history.” You know, avoiding absolutes. So it goes.

APROPOS – “ Peace hath higher tests of manhood/Than battle ever knew.”
John Greenleaf Whittier (1853)