Tomorrow is UN Day - I posted this two years ago - I headed it Cavalcade of the World – as recognition of the news of time time passing ….. and in homage to then retiring Scott Simon of NPR. The U.N. is a source of controversy now – conservatives see it as a Martian colony that landed East of Murray Hill In NY …. ….. When I was young … it was hopeful thing… better than the League of Nations – say this in the wrong bar today and you get an F U.
'What's the big look back and ponder?' Simon is asked. He said more or less:"I recall when I started out the world was still working to ensure the carnage of the Holocaust and WW II would not be (easily) repeated. So we had UN, NATO, Berlin Airlift, and so on.The biggest surprise today is that motivation to put humanism ahead of nationalism has unexpectedly been TURNED ON ITS HEAD." Why does he still do radio he is asked and Simon says the likes to watch the Cavalcade of the World. (Cavalcade is formal procession of people walking, riding on horseback or vehicles.)
I re-read bits of Henry Petroski’s book about bridge engineering. The take away I got was that people learn to build bridges based on learned first-principles - the stretch out from that, and a new generation forgets the first principles that underlie the design. A bridge collapses. And the people learn it all over again. What was learned in the 1930s and 1940s was that civilization could dissolve if authoritarians were empowered. But people don’t know that for sure anymore..the ones that know it are in the old graveyard.
Guess the Cavalcade of History goes around and around the block like Patton's troops confusing spies in Tangiers. - JVaughan
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