H.R. McMaster, retired Army Lieutenant General was interviewed on one of the Sunday morning news programs this past week. He held the position of United States Security Advisor under Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018. McMaster was also active in the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. McMaster was in the process of resigning from his security advisor position when then-President Donald Trump beat him to the punch and fired him. You might say that McMaster was Trumped. Three others served in that position in the Trump administration, none of them lasting much longer than a year.
In the course of his television interview, McMaster referred to a quote that pricked my ears. He said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” This quote has been attributed to Mark Twain (Samuel Clemons), by many, though we don’t know for certain if he actually said it. Still, it sounds a heck of a lot like something Twain would say.
The reason history doesn’t repeat itself is because in this realm time marches on. The reason it often rhymes is because there are many parallels between what has happened in the past and what is happening in the present.
Students of history can chart counterparts to present occurrences to help avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. This applies to nearly every area of life. What is the importance of this? George Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher born in 1863 said, “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” This statement has universal application to just about every part of our lives.
I recall how in the Academy Award winning movie Patton,General George S. Patton was an avid student of war and of the means and methods used that won and lost great battles of the past. He did not want to repeat the same mistakes of the past and he wanted to use the strategies of the victors of old.
Robert Wheeler, President of Edison Birthplace Assn. Inc. recalled that when Thomas Alva Edison was working on the alkaline battery, a newspaper reporter asked (paraphrased) “Mr. Edison you have failed 10,000 times. When are you going to quit.?” Edison reportedly replied “ I haven’t failed 10,000 times. I know 10,000 things that don’t work. Something will work and I will find it.”
So over and over and over again, Edison went back to the drawing board to “solve for X” and to succeed in his mission. In the end it took nearly 50,000 experiments and 10 years for Edison to make a practical alkaline battery.
My late uncle, Ron Gober, was a NASA engineer on Apollo 11, the first spacecraft to make a landing on the surface of the moon. He helped develop the timing system for the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from Apollo 11 to the face of the moon in 1969. (That technology eventually led to the Accutron watch that used a tuning fork to keep time accurately.)
Before the Apollo missions there were Mercury missions and test pilot flights. After every single one of these engineers, scientists, and mathematicians painstakingly monitored all parts of the mission and went back to the drawing board to improve performance and correct errors.
Somewhere in Oxford someone is doing the same thing with their cooking. They are trying new things, testing them, throwing them in the trash, and going back to the drawing board. This is predominantly how we learn and grow. This is how we get better. Doing the same thing over and over without searching for the reasons for failing results is, at best, folly. We must take a hard look at what has and hasn’t worked and go back to the drawing board until our project is as perfect as we can make it—even in our politics.
On Tuesday, November 5, 2024, we will elect a new president. Let’s all make sure we’ve gone back to the drawing board and looked at the REAL history of both our major candidates before we cast our ballot.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. John Dewey
…and that’s the View from The Balcony.
Randy Weeks is a Licensed Professional Counselor, a Certified Shamanic Life Coach, an ordained minister, a singer-songwriter, an actor, and a writer. He has spent a lot of time at the drawing board. Randy may be reached at: randallsweeks@gmail.com.
