WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND
A few months ago, I was out playing in the yard with my grandson. He had found an old boomerang in our garage and wanted to try it. We had fun flinging it around and after several attempts I finally remembered how to put the right touch on the throw, and we laughed at how it would fly through the yard and then come back our way.
This activity got me to thinking about the phrase “what goes around comes around” and how it is true in so many things.
History is without a doubt that way. European philosopher and novelist George Santayana, in his 1905 book The Life of Reason, is credited with the famous but often misquoted line “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Historians can give hundreds and even thousands of examples of repetitions in society and government. Wars are fought and won, with terms of surrender agreed to, then terms change, eventually causing more wars. Revolutions take place leading to brutal dictatorships, which eventually lead to more wars and revolutions.
Couples and families also have their own brands of history repeating, and people who don’t learn from mistakes continue to repeat causing the breakup of many family units, eventually causing changes in communities and societies.
Second Amendment advocates are in a constant fight to teach this lesson to those who mistakenly think that by voluntarily removing firearms from society the world would be a safer and more enjoyable place. History has shown repeatedly that anytime this has happened bad things occur.
The more fun part of this realization of repetition, however, comes from the language and fashions of the various decades. On a recent trip to a shopping mall with my daughter, I was amused by the fashions hanging in the store display windows. On one occasion, she proudly modeled a new outfit that looked like it could have been worn by Marcia on an episode of The Brady Bunch.
A few weeks later, my wife was going through a closet in her childhood home we decided to remodel and found a jacket she wore in junior high from the 1970s. Again, my daughter thought it was the coolest jacket she had ever seen and explained to me that those styles were the “in” styles of the day for high schoolers.
This was further affirmed when she and some of her friends were thumbing through some old yearbooks of mine from the late 70s and early 80s. Upon further inspection, I got to noticing many of the clothes and hair styles at the school were beginning to resemble familiar looks from that era.
Language doesn’t always catch up, though. While teaching a class of high schoolers a couple of years ago an unappealing discussion came up and they looked at me in total confusion when I naturally responded with “oh gag me with a spoon!”
Now that a couple of years have passed, I am hoping styles are returning to the 80s era of my high school and college years, which were beyond doubt the most fun and cool of my life. Oftentimes I would happily climb into a DeLorean DMC-12 with a flux capacitor and crank that baby up to 88 MPH and shoot my way back to the 80s for a few days and enjoy big hair and Izod shirts. To me, that would be totally rad. I just need to remember to pack up some extra plutonium for the trip back or it would be a major bummer – like totally for sure.
Randy Gibson is the CEO of RDG Communications Group, LLC, and the former director of the Tahlequah Area Chamber of Commerce and the Texas State Rifle Association.
