Let’s hope that the current generation will learn from our mistakes!

I read this less as “let those that follow learn from our mistakes” and more “let’s hope enough of us contemporaries stand against it and stave off evil”… which, it’s easy to get depressed about considering he was elected and certainly some segment of society fully supports him. But we’ve also seen some pretty intense grassroots efforts to counter these policies… Minnesota was downright inspiring in their response.

A lot of people who voted for Trump didn’t do so out of explicitly supporting racist, fascistic garbage, but rather a severely misguideded attempt at voting for literally anything that isn’t just the same socially liberal vs socially conservative neoliberal politics that has been the only choice since the 90’s and Clinton’s move to a “Third Way” following Reagan’s neoliberalising the GOP. Those people aren’t lost causes, they have a legitimate grievance and just made an awful conclusion based on it. And it is starting to look like a lot of them are realizing it.

We’re still balls deep in this shit, and it isn’t really clear how things will turn out yet. There is still very much a chance we will look back on this as a close call that we fought off with our own (belated, but there) good decisions that stopped a problem we started before it got unsalvageable. We don’t need to wait to see how the next generation will fix it, we’re still actively fighting this fight.

There’s this YouTuber I watch, and she does these life in France style videos. In one she plays her American self talking to her French character about sick leave in the us. And the French character is like (paraphrasing):

French: Sick leave? They control how many days you can be sick? That’s ridiculous!

American: yeah, the law doesn’t require any sick leave at all

French: oh no no no, you must not tolerate this!

American: well, I’m not really sure how we’d change it

French: you need to shit in the river and burn down government offices!

And to clarify, I’m not suggesting anyone does that. I’m just saying, future people don’t “learn from our examples” when our examples are “whine about and do nothing,” they learn from our examples when our examples are things like the fucking French revolution.

Let’s hope that the current generation will learn from our mistakes!

I agree; I wouldn’t much care for someone leaning on that position either — seems too easy to use it as a crutch to avoid taking any steps forward, as a way of tossing one’s hands upwards and otherwise saying, “Welp, we’ll just have to wait until the next group fixes it.” The intent of the reflection in this comic, though, both in dialogue and as supported by the title, is to speak to the decisions and actions people do take. Our past is filled with the decisions people made in their ‘today’. I can look back at the time of the American civil rights movement or the abolishment of slave trades, and I can appreciate that there were those folks who stood and made their choices to do what they could, because I am now down the line of those choices and am blessed to see their worth.

I believe humans have always been very human, and I don’t think this is going to change of our own volition. Our time here on this Earth will consistently find us up against greed and corruption and cruelty. But I also have hope. Not naively in some utopia of human creation, but in part that no matter what terrible things each generation faces (and brings upon themselves and upon this planet), there will continue to be folks who stand in opposition to the darkness in the ways that they can. That fella up there in this box concluded with the phrase, “Let’s roll,” which was made famous as the final known words of a passenger in the 9/11 flight that was crashed into the field after the folks on board fought back. It was a call to action then, not of some military endeavor but something deeper, and it’s echoed here again in the same light on this anniversary — as encouragement and motivation to strive against whatever current struggles we are facing.

If you still don’t appreciate this view or the comic, or feel I failed to express the former correctly in the latter, fair enough and no worries, Internet Stranger. I just caught your reply and thought I’d take a moment to clarify my aim :)

It was a very surreal time. I live in southern CA, at the time near enough to a nuclear power plant and military base that in the initial uncertainties I either felt much safer or much LESS safe, depending on the moment.

I was a young adult, out of high school and working at a Blockbuster (yep). I cried at the tragic loss of people I never knew, again after the shock of the Falling Man photo showed up in our local newspaper, kept my TV tuned to the news for days because I too wanted to know answers to all of your questions, but I will always remember the stark difference in the tone of what movies people came in to rent. Families came in to get away from the non-stop news on TV, yes, but across the board our comedies and escapist movies were the heavy draw. I suppose, even 25 years later, there’s still a catharsis in remembering those odd little details like that.