History Is Repeating Itself

I would usually put something like this in draft, but these three data points keep bugging me, waking me up at night; bothering me while traveling cross country; and, interrupting my thoughts while at Starbucks. So, I will post the data points, and expand on the subject at later date:

• Industrial Revolution: 1760 - 1820/1860
• Romanticism Period: 1790 - 1800/1850 (peaked between 1800 and 1850)
• Americans afraid of pipelines, perhaps the most mundane "thing" this country does

I was "forced" to finally start this subject when I read the headline/article that Don sent me: shale gas fracking a low risk to public health, review finds. Reuters is reporting out of London. Great Britain is debating whether to bankrupt their country with wind energy or become energy independent through fracking. It doesn't take a geologist or rocket scientist to know where this is going.

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A Note To The Granddaughters

During the summer between my junior year and senior year in high school (1968), I took a summer course in "Romanticism" at St Olaf College, Northsomething, Minnesota. It was an incredible course, perhaps the most important thing I did during my high school years. (The most important thing I did in junior high was take a typing course during the summer following eighth grade. Prior to that, the most important thing I did was build a pinball machine with my close friend, Bruce.)

Some years before that summer at St Olaf College, I remember the specific moment when John F Kennedy said, in 1961: the United States should set as a goal the "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth" by the end of the decade.

I was ten years old, watching television, eating popcorn, and had just dropped a kernel on the floor when my mom asked me if I was okay and the wind was howling outside, and we were expecting a May thunderstorm, and the sky was getting darker and darker, and then the president said he was going to send a man to the moon. He didn't say which man, but I believed him. I thought maybe he was going to send Hubert Humphrey (too big) or maybe Richard Nixon (too controversial).

Now, I am older, wiser (?), certainly more cynical, and we have a president who can't get a website right and the Americans are afraid of underground pipelines.

The course on "Romanticism" helps me understand why Americans are afraid of underground pipelines. It's funny how things happen.