OUR previous columns have coincidentally enabled us to successfully celebrate several dates with the coming of the Christmas and the New Year for 2021 to 2022. Thus, as with our past columns, we briefly shared some of the more notable insights on the coming yuletide season. We also make the connection of the coming Christmas and New Year celebrations as people from all over the world have celebrated these historical events. It is especially notable during the Christmas celebration that people in different countries have shared the joys of the birth of a historic Child bringing the blessings of love and peace to all humanity.
Furthermore, the succeeding arrival of the New Year brings with it the hopes and expectations of a better life for the different countries of the world.
What then are the insights contained in the lessons of these various historic events? What are the more specific meanings and hopes of humankind and how will people in different countries experience the blessings of these iconic events? In fact, what are the various insights brought by history from the experiences of the past? With these questions, people in different countries hopefully expect the blessings of the past and the coming year. Among these are the expectations for good health and education, better economic living conditions, or successful careers and political participation in different countries.
The reality of human life, however, has been a mixture of positive and negative events and these could be the bases for lessons to be learned from history. Briefly stated, how will human beings derive various insights with different countries in hoping for unity and cooperation or avoiding indecisiveness or conflicts that may disturb the peace and progress of people from different nations?
From history, peoples from different areas recall various insights in human life. From the paraphrase of Machiavelli by the English writer Algernon Sidney, "virtue is essentially necessary to the establishment and preservation of liberty, that it is impossible for a corrupted people to set up a good government, or for a tyranny to be introduced, if people are virtuous." For insights some 300 years later, the American President Harry S. Truman wrote "that many countries have to be awakened every now and then to the fact that the people are also responsible for the kind of government they get. And when they elect leaders who don't take care of their living conditions, they have few leaders to blame but themselves."
Inspiring insights from history include those of Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the late US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who wrote that "the course of history is directed by choices we make and our choices grow out of the ideas, the beliefs, the values, the dreams of the people. It is not so much the powerful leaders that determine our destiny as the much more powerful influence of the combined voices of the people themselves." In these several quotations, people can discern valuable insights on learnings from history.