Turning Their Backs On Progress

I feel like we're living in the Dark Ages.  You would think that society would progress, that we would accumulate knowledge and move forward from that base.  We wouldn't have to refight these arguments about birth control, racism, women's rights, etc.  Instead, we (generally I mean us as a country,  not the world as a whole) have ended up at a place where many of us don't know what happened in the past.  And don't care.  We aren't learning from what happened yesterday, much less what happened ten or a hundred years ago.  So we're losing that institutional knowledge that might be passed on.  So we're starting from scratch- it seems like every individual has to start from scratch, isn't learning from history or from those around them.

Instead of saying "well, my grandparents were very racist, my parents were somewhat racist, and I'm a little racist," we go back to square one and there are racist idiots everywhere.  We have to start all over, and teach each person how to be decent.  So we're not advancing as a society, we're not making progress.  We're regressing.

I, of course, mostly blame conservatives.  Sure, there are a few liberals that contribute to the lack of progress, but it's mostly conservatives.  The willful ignorance about history and current events comes from the conservative camp.  And in fact, many of them actually want to move the country back, so that makes sense.  They look back and see that things were better, for them at least, and ignore how much worse things were for others, and even in other ways for themselves.  It's disheartening.