Thought for the Day: Perspective

^[1]No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives. Five years is a lot. Twenty years is the horizon to most people. Fifty years is antiquity. To understand how the impact of destiny fell upon any generation of men one must first imagine their position and then apply the time-scale of our own lives.

— Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) British statesman and author.
History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Vol. 1 “The Birth of Britain” (1956-58)

I try to keep this in mind when considering politics, and the glacial movement of causes that I believe in.  I think of the seemingly endless eight years of George W. Bush, or how it seems that Glenn Beck has been spouting his zaniness forever, or even matters like marriage equality and the like.

And I realize that such durations, taken from an historical perspective, will be mere blips.  Fifty, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years from now, the antics (not to mention the names) of 99% of the folks in the news today will be long-forgotten, or summarized in a few paragraphs outlining political events in North America in the Post-War or Pre-Flood or Some Other Bigger Perspective Label Era.

On the other hand, I have to live with it all now, day by day.  “A hundred years hence, none of it will matter,” may or may not be true, and it can provide a bit of perspective, but the pain it causes me, and the direction it pushes that history in, fraction of a degree at a time or not, is very immediate. A century from now, nobody will know which way I drove to work, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to keep my eyes on the road.

The reverse (which Churchill is actually talking about) is also true.  When we read in history about a tyrant’s reign that lasted “only” ten years, or a period of war between two countries over fifty years, we chalk it all up to something that happened between 1348 and 1402 and it seem like such a small thing.  And it is, to us, but it was a lifetime (or two or three) for the people who lived through it.

Or think of the period between WWI and WWII — something that seems a mere blip, but was 21 years long — and encompassed flappers and the Jazz Age, Prohibition, and the Great Depression.  Telling someone in the middle of the era that history was just taking a pause before the next big war would be foolish.  Heck, we think of six years as being a trivial period — but in Churchill’s case, I’m sure his political exile “Wilderness Years” were hardly trivial to live through, and almost certainly seemed endless.

(via WIST ^[2])