By Kurt Hurner
Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, “It may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generations. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please.” Are we facing a fourth turning where from 1940 to 1981 we lived in a more FDR style liberal society only to have from 1981 to the Present a more Reagan style conservative society? Is it time for a 1940 to 1981 style society after the 2022 Midterms?
The idea is that after 80 years, on average human beings who remember 80 years ago are dead so no one on Earth alive in the Present was not around or too young to remember those events. A great example of this took place in 1999 when Senator Phil Graham spoke out in support of repealing what was called Glass-Steagall Act that was part of the 1933 United States Banking Act that separated commercial and investment banking. Graham argued that we had all of these laws in place to protect our money so there is no need to have Glass-Steagall. Because of no memory of the senators and representatives in Congress in 1999 seeing what life was like before the 1933 Banking Act and Bill Clinton still in a conservative mood, that repeal led to the Crash of 2008 during the George W. Bush administration. As we prepare to leave 2022 and go into 2023, there is talk of wanting to vote either every year or every five years to sunset Medicare and Social Security. Again, lack of memory of what kind of abject poverty our seniors and disabled Americans lived in, or had to depend on their families; mostly their eldest sons for survival before 1935 and 1965.
OTRCat is a perfect tool for the present and future so that the listener can understand the past. With such valuable collections like the Kent State Shootings in 1970, September 11, 2001, and January 6, 2021 and everything before and in between where you hear these events in real time give you a front row seat to that history.
In addition to events, you can meet some interesting characters in our history from President Calvin Coolidge to President Joe Biden. There are contenders like Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, and Hillary Clinton that you will get to know. But there are members of Congress like Bobby Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Newt Gingrich, and Nancy Pelosi. But we cannot forget great military heroes like Douglas MacArthur and Colin Powell. Some of these people you might be getting to know for the first time or reacquainting with an old friend, but they are people who have made and shaped history that we live in decades later.
Unlike watching these events on a movie or television screen where you see the images, the audio is MUCH MORE POWERFUL as you have what is called theater of the mind and that will make you appreciate the past more.
With this technology of the present and future, Old Time Radio has that bridge for people to link to the past for preservation so that when we’re all gone from the Earth at the dawn of the 22nd Century, those Americans will have an oral resource to learn from so that they can revere our successes of the 20th and 21st Centuries and learn from our failures as well.
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