You don’t have to have lived as long as I have to be as young as I am. I continually find first-time-youngers discover what’s new when I saw it new before, often many times.

Things keep coming back.

That’s one of the values of memory. We like to remember, the good, not the bad. But sometimes we need to remember the bad to keep the good good, and avoid the bad, which seems always there just waiting for us to renew it.

And memory is selective. I’m trying to retrain mine. I’m trying to be more fully aware of what I remember and what it means, what memories to keep active, a full-time job for a lifetime. I’m working on it.

I see how each generation tries to establish itself by staking a claim on something new as theirs, a new idea, a new turn of phrase, the current way to say things and think new about them.

If the older generation has done its job, it limits the new generation to the extent that they know who they are and where they came from so they can decide where to go from here. The new kids on the block all went to school where they learned their language which allows the ideas they have. I think of my Father, in so many ways brilliant, better educated than me, was kind and generous, spoke Latin and Greek, rejected religion, but swallowed the party line: “People would never do that.”

I could say, “But they do, and they did, and it looks like they will, unless…”

And my Father-in-law. He was a progressive Greek. He knew things change. He liked progress. He said, “Things change and make progress to get better, that’s why we call it progress, progress is always good.”

I could say, “Change isn’t always progress.”

We believe things selectively. I think of the colleague some years ago who taught math and thought of becoming a Muslim because he was black and Black Muslims were a thing at the time. He taught his class that Mohammed influenced Christianity because he pre-dated Christ. I asked when Mohammed died. He said, “632 A.D.” I asked, “What does the A.D. mean?” He said, “Anno Domini, the Year of Our Lord, so all A.D. dates show how many years after Christ was born, you can do the math, addition, subtraction…” I said, “Yes, after.” He said, “I choose to believe Mohammed came before.”

Yes, we believe what we choose. We don’t always question our choices, because questions can lead to answers we don’t choose.

We know something about the way history works. We know something about repetition. We devise clichés to make us comfortable. We know each generation must discover itself. Old people say “rediscover” because they went through it before when it was their turn.

That’s why my “cliché sensor” goes off when I see a replay of the old executive boardroom where the bosses sit around the table trying to gauge the response to a new sales pitch. “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.”

Flagpoles, yes. Salutes, yes.

We’ve trained our young to salute. They don’t have to be in the military to follow orders. We’ve drawn the line against “the inconceivable.” We’ve written laws against “thought conception.” We’ve made it hard to think, hard to remember change, hard even to imagine it. When a cliché comes back to do its job, it becomes new again, if we’ve done our old school job properly. All those old words: suppression, conformity, reactionary – they’re still around, still “work like a charm.”

So when we “run it up the flagpole to see who salutes,” we know immediately, if we’re awake and not asleep, we’ve heard it all before, and not just flags and upside down. The ear resonates to the near parallel near contiguous “string him up,” with the same flagpole motion, and we have Pence and Pelosi, and bodies hanging from trees.

People reveal themselves by their words. We need to learn our words well enough to know if they mean what we want them to. We need to think about our words, stop taking the thought out of them.

Evolution has given us human brains. Our brains make us human. Animals think, even plants and rocks, but we think better, harder, deeper, more often, all the time if we allow ourselves. The less we think, the less human we are. We degrade ourselves down the scale to rocks which only exist without being aware of it. We can be better than rocks. We can be aware.

Words let us know. They let us think and feel and know how and where and why.

And who am I to make pronouncements and give advice?

I’m only using words.