So it seems only natural that folks like to peer back into history to discover who we are by what came before.  I like a good story as well as the next guy, but after a while it is time to move on, or as Garth urges his friend in Wayne's World, "Live in the now!"

I have seen history buffs get lost in the past, reliving battles from old wars and lionizing the generals who fought them.  The patina of history turns blood into unremarkable sepia tones and we cannot hear the cries of the wounded and dying, much like our truncated coverage of the war in Iraq.

So too nostalgia becomes a wonderful drug.  Why is it that stories of `yesteryear' are always so quaint?  Hearing my dad talk about putting cardboard into his shoes during the Great Depression seemed like a lark to my child's mind.  And when my mother talked about her mother feeding out-of-work men who would go from back door to back door in Chicago, she keeping a pot of soup on the stove for them, this too sounded like some pretty, happy fairy story.  For me, this is the danger of nostalgia.  The winners always get to tell the stories, and they always come out smelling of lavender and rosewater rather than sweat and manure.

Any gardener knows it is important to take stock of what has been planted previously, to test the soil, to amend it. So too, we must face our past with eyes as clear as possible.  Prettying up our history, our wars, our prejudices, our intolerance, is like overlooking a gallon of Round-Up that spilled in the flower bed,  just as waxing poetic about times past (that magically have vastly improved now that they are no longer able to be contested) is both a lie and waste of our time.

I think our future and our children are better served by paying careful attention to reality.  With the enormity and complexity of the problems we are facing today we need everyone's full attention.  If we pull our heads out of the past and take a look at the present maybe we can make some positive choices so the future won't have to be re-written to sound better than it will be.