How can you be shocked, shocked to find injustice going on in America after Ferguson (film noir anyone?)? And yet, people like Patricia McGuire of Trinity Washington University act as if the country has not been having a conversation about having a conversation about race for the past two plus years:
“We Americans study the history of tyranny and exclaim, ‘That’s terrible, but it would not happen here!’ as we congratulate ourselves on the robust state of our democracy. The experience of the last few months now exposes this once-confident boast as terribly naive and perhaps even dangerous as a new administration indulges in a remarkable torrent of false and misleading statements as a basis for policy and action,” she wrote. “The gravest lie we are grappling with at the present moment is the Trump Administration’s cruel and unreasonable war on immigrants — mostly people who are black and brown, and Muslim — Mexicans and refugees from central America, Syrian refugees, people from certain countries in the Middle East and Africa including Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia.”
Black lives mattered before Trump?
This is why we worry about those who use the present to turn history into morality plays. What history does best is teach students we’ve been here before, all is vanity. Only Whig historians believe in progress and then are surprised when their narratives let them down.
Old Life 
“What history does best is teach students we’ve been here before, all is vanity.”
Dr. Hart,
I am using this from now on, but attributing it to you of course.
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“What history does best is teach students we’ve been here before, all is vanity.”
Clarification:
World worldview: All is vanity
Christian worldview: All human effort is vanity apart from relationship with the Lord and lasting effort to accomplish His eternal purposes (ps and no one escapes accountability to Him Eccl 12:13-14)
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Ali, revision: Christian FAITH puts no (eternal) hope in the (very good but passing) things of the world, of which there is nothing new under the sun.
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Hey, I think we might agree Zrim. Believers do not have false hope in this world and all in not vanity in this world for believers.
Believers hope in God, His eternal work, and His promises and part of that is that even now nothing is meaningless here for believers – we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. Rom 8:28 – and we know momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, 2 Cor 4:17
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