In times like these, it helps to remember there have always been times like these. – Paul Harvey
Paul Harvey was an American radio announcer who had a long career in an industry not particularly known for them. He was born in Tulsa in 1918 and lived 90 useful years, though I am biased because, along with others, I listened to Harvey and his influence on a young boy who also wanted to be a radio announcer was not insignificant, though perhaps not as strong as others.
Anyway, Harvey had a knack for homespun wisdom and this isn’t the first time I’ve used this quote, having also hijacked it for the introduction to my book The Liberty Handbook.
Harvey squarely hits the nail with the hammer with this thought. Growing up it was, among other things, war, the economy and the Middle East.
Today it is, among other things, war, the economy and the Middle East.
I don’t think, however, that this shows the inevitability of our existence. I merely think history keeps repeating itself because us humans are too busy fussing over our day-to-day existences that, collectively, we never really bother to learn the lessons History is trying to teach us.
There have always been times like these…
Amid the unchanging landscape of our human experience we have the opportunity to heed history’s greatest lesson: that we have only one chance at this life and what we get out of it is, to a degree that might astonish some of us, dependent on the work we put it into it. We can make our time serve us, or we can serve time while we’re on this planet. We can utilize the talents and ambitions we were born with, or we can fritter away our precious existence. The choice is up to us.
