By Dylan R.N. Crabb

I like to think about how humans in the far future will look back on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Who will be remembered, what will be glorified/demonized, and what will be considered the defining events of the generations?

There are currently 8 billion+ people on Earth and there be even more in the future (hopefully).  How many individuals are going to stand out amongst 8 billion people?  I’m guessing not many.

Humans have a tendency to limit their frame of reference to their own lifetimes, which is a natural.  At first glance, why should a person care about events that they don’t live to see themselves?  The human mind has difficulty contemplating many things on a large scale, which is also understandable considering that we’ve been evolving on this planet for roughly 200,000 years amidst a universe that has been changing and expanding for billions of years.  How can humans even attempt to understand the complexity of the universe when we are still fighting each other on Earth over trivial bullshit.

Many issues that plague humanity today is largely due to this lack of foresight in each generation – a major issue of one generation can most likely be traced back to a major issue of the previous generation.  The current “War on Terror” is a product of American imperialist attitudes that fostered during the Cold War between the United States and the United Sovereign Socialists Republic; the Cold War was a product of the arms race between the US and the USSR during World War 2; World War 2 began with a disgruntled fascist political party in Germany that attained power by preying on dissatisfaction over the results of the first world war; World War 1 was sparked from imperialist rivalries throughout Europe over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and those imperialist aspirations sprouted from nationalist sentiments throughout Europe that can be traced back to the fall of the Roman Republic/Empire; the Roman Republic has roots in the previous city-states of ancient Greece . . .  Do I need to continue?

To put it simply, human history is just one fucking thing after another.