As someone once pontificated , “People who reminisce about the good old days have both a good imagination and a bad memory.”
I am actually glad to be living in the 21st century. When I read a quote in The Agamemnon by Aeschylus I found one more reason why:
“For the heart of man is hardened by infatuation,
A faulty advisor, the first link of sorrow.”
When I read that I thought, “Wow, that’s so true. People will do really stupid, pain-causing things when they are mindlessly infatuated with someone.”
But alas, you caught me eisegeting again.
The quote refers to Agamemnon’s gruesome sacrifice of his daughter before the infamous, bloody, 10-year Trojan war (yes, the one with the horse).
Far from having a crush on someone, Agamemnon's infatuation was with his family’s honor in war.
Now…I’ve been afraid before. But I have never had to be afraid that my dad was going to sacrifice one of my sisters so that the company would have a good year.
So I guess we can feel pretty good about ourselves in our enlightened age…apart from our ongoing holocaust of 47 million innocents, and a few other moral trifles.
Posted by mgemb at April 21, 2006 02:29 PMI think every era has an evil quota that it has to meet. It seems that cultures change and societal sins are eradicated, but as soon as we get rid of one we have another.
People of our era justify abortion by questioning the humanity of the victims. A lot of good, morally upright people turn a blind eye. We did the same thing 60 years ago with segregation and Jim Crow. We did the same thing 120 years ago with the Native Americans. We did the same thing 200 years ago with slaves. We evolve continually but we always find a way to manifest our depravity.
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