Wait! We’re so smart? How about the Greeks and Romans and their urbane compatriots?
The sky is falling! Breaking news! Our fragile democracy in peril!!
Life still feels shaky. Even without those constant, frenetic tweets threatening to alter the course of world events in moments, truth competes with fake news. Long-established rights and laws are questioned — or disappear before our eyes. American democracy, firm in its1787 roots and long cherished, now teeters on the brink.
Maybe what goes around comes around.
Maybe there’s nothing — or at least not that much — new under the sun.
I recently had the great good fortune to spend some time with family and an archaeologist friend in ancient Italy and Greece: Cefalu, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Athens — proud metropolitan centers of a few centuries back, where the elite and the downtrodden went about their daily lives without any futuristic dream of upstart cities like New York or San Francisco. Confronted with visions of that future they might have been awed, but I suspect they might also have sniffed. Oh, really? You think you’re so clever?
