Not seeing the forest for the trees
This could be much worse than we ever thought
By Mike Meyer
The older I get the more I realize that things are sometimes what they appear and sometimes not. The more important things are the more prone they are to multiple possible meanings. This is the nature of historical analysis and also the nature of all efforts to understand what is happening around us. The more formal this process is the more complex and the more aware we are of the limitations of a final statement of truth.
Some of the things that comes with age, I find, are sensitivity to being fooled by appearances, a reluctant but greater reliance on feeling for correctness, and a broader range of experience on how surprising human stupidity can be and how obvious things that happened should have been earlier in our experience of them. We would all like to think that we have better skills at figuring things out if, for no other reason, than that our ability to run away quickly is much reduced when we are old.
My own history as an historian, technologist, educator, and entrepreneur on top of youthful training in military intelligence has brought me to this point. And I think I’m as sure as I can be that there is a problem here much bigger than our media in the US have addressed.
