Is it true that history seems to be the subject young Americans find most irrelevant as if anything that happened before the internet is prehistory? Not so, my daughter says.
Am I wrong to think that a generation is being brought up thinking that Blacks were happily jamming in cotton fields and indigenous people all ran casinos while Aristotle was in Lincoln's cabinet and Joan of Arc married Noah?
In fact, Gen Z and Millennials do care, in broad terms, about getting the chronicle right, so I'm told. I am heartened to be corrected.
With this in mind, I spin the great wheel, and it lands on 1688. No, that wasn't the number of cheeseburgers sold in the first hour of the newest McDonald's or the combined I.Q. of any 20 red state senators.
1688 is the year Holland invaded England with 400 ships including a new King and Queen and 20,000 of their closest friends. Strong winds sped their journey across the Channel while the British fleet was stuck in the Thames estuary by that same gust. William & Mary deposed James II and that ended the Papist rule in England forever.
The Brits call the whole takeover The Glorious Revolution. To be sure the new monarchs were welcomed by most. William of Orange brought significant changes into Britain, but oranges were not one of them. They were introduced a century before.
Under his reign, the stock market was established. He made innovations in horticulture, encouraged scientific inquiry (optics and astronomy), philosophy and the Arts. The reign of William and Mary triggered the Age of Enlightenment which led to our Democracy.
It is a fact that the rate of illiteracy is much higher in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe. This has been true since the Protestant Reformation which took hold in Great Britain, Germany, The Netherlands and Scandinavia. Bible reading was encouraged, while Portugal, Spain and Italy discouraged literacy under the grip of the Vatican.
A case could be made that governments then (as now) are instruments of business interests. The British East India Co. swapped with the Dutch East India Co. In one of the great swindles of history the Dutch, under duress, traded Manhattan for Suriname in South America.
It was John Locke, the 17th century British philosopher, whose ideas about a social contract directly found their way into our Declaration of Independence. What evolved into our unique Democracy has always been dependent on some measure of participation. These days we are witness to its fragility due, in part, to a misinformed public, all the more ironic in this age of so-called connectivity. The slumbering masses are distributed among all age groups but there was a surge to the right among first time voters in 2024.
I must learn not to paint with such a broad brush, however if history and civics were valued now as they were in decades past, our electorate would hold candidates to a higher standard and understand that legislation affects their well-being. It just might dawn on low-information voters that their health care and Social Security are more important than conspiracy theories or empty panaceas directed against an imagined enemy.
Perhaps a massive reawakening is happening. The significant turnout under harsh weather in Minneapolis, including young people, is proof enough that I have wrongly consigned a generation to a shared dunce cap. They have shown up to register the defense of the 1st amendment guaranteeing their right to assemblage and dissent.
The dictatorship we fought against in 1776, again in WWII and now in our midst must be defeated at the polls in November. The dissolution of our Democracy would be a betrayal of our Founders.
