Second Report from the Committee for the Review of History, Issued on 8 March 2217

Our initial report from this Committee for the Review of History, published on 6 March 2217, established important themes and noted certain historical junctures from which the thinking of our educated citizenry in the 23^rd century can be traced, in counter-position to the crude level of education, thought, and citizenship that prevailed in the early 21^st century.

 

In this second report, issued two days later on 8 March 2217, we wish to convey to our readers, which is to say the bulk of citizens in the Universal Confederacy, further observations from our study as to the state of society in the United States Sub-Region of North America (what was in 2017 known as the United States of America), based on our intense review of the historical record.

 

We offer these stark facts to our academically sophisticated populace, accustomed as that citizenry is to examining evidence objectively and with careful attention to factual detail, along with a few comments contrasting the state of our own public consciousness in the year 2217 with the low level of citizen awareness prevailing two hundred years ago.  

 

Therefore, be aware that these conditions, unimaginable to us in the year 2217, actually prevailed in the year 2017:

 

>>>>>    In most urban centers, homeless people were allowed to beg for handouts from passersby, mostly drivers of automobiles. 

 

>>>>>    The above observation implies that these were the days before our comprehensive mass rapid transit system made individual cars unnecessary, and before the World Council of Religions met in 2125, published the seminal document, Universal Ethics, and shifted toward an application of moral principles of the great world faiths to the realm of action.

 

>>>>>    And the immediately prior observation prepares us to reveal that people on their way to Sunday church services in the year 2017 actually drove by those people of need, so eager were they to hear pastoral sermons promising personal salvation;  they would then drive right past those same homeless people in their similar eagerness to consume Sunday dinner and watch professional football.

 

>>>>>    And this observation provides segue for the additional startling note that in the year 2017 professional and other classifications of American football were still legal, and that watching that sport via the technologically crude medium of television was not only a Sunday but also a Monday evening ritual for those church-goers and others, especially that stock comedic character in our 23^rd century dramatic productions---  the American male.

  

>>>>>    At least half the populace in the year 2017 thought of government as something apart from themselves and even as the enemy;  the poor quality of the public education system had not yet imbued people with a sense of genuine citizenship, so that they did not recognize their identity with the government.

 

>>>>>    This leads us to the observation that instead of taking personal action on matters of common concern, most members of the populace of the year 2017 in the United States of America (our United States Sub-Region of North America) spent their private time watching shows that purported to be representations of reality and in frivolous use of a crude technology called, “Twitter.”

 

>>>>>    This in turn leads us to reveal that few people in 2017 read articles and books of any length, either in the physical print form that made such resurgence from the mid- 22^nd century, or in the “website” formats then prevailing;  people in 2017 had not yet encountered the sophisticated computer technology that we now utilize so seamlessly with physically printed sources.

 

>>>>>    And the latter observation leads us to convey, too, that people of 2017 seem to have cared little for factual information and had little ability to distinguish fact from fiction;  only after the Trump Tribulation of 2017-2025 and the partly intersecting Great Debate of 2020-2030 did what was then known as the “American” people undergo a sociopolitical shift toward an appreciation of factual information and informed discussion.

 

>>>>>    That appreciation of factual information and informed discussion led in turn to a massive reevaluation of public education;  after decades of trendy notions and quick reversal of pedagogical approaches emanating from the ill-informed speculations of university-based education professors, the masses of people demanded a shift toward fact-filled subject area education, imparted by teachers possessing legitimate subject area masters and doctoral degrees (rather than now-defunct degrees in education).

 

>>>>>  This is to convey that in 2017 public education was mired in the processes and policies of abdominal iterations of the locally centralized school district;  and to relate that from the year 2030 our society in what was soon to become the United States Sub-Region of North America realized many of the improvements that now define our lives, on the basis of this shift to a system of public education based on knowledge-intensive curriculum, objective analysis of factual information, and respect for texts, which all of our people can now both create and read.