In these dark days, when the moral compass of this country has gone amok, I keep remembering the words of a hero of my hippy days.  “When will they ever learn?” was the chorus of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” a song recorded by everyone from Joan Baez to Dolly Parton, with the most iconic version being that of Peter, Paul and Mary.

And now my generation is in charge (although some of them should have long since segued into assisted living) and, clearly, we have never learned.  We were angry in the 1960s, but we were also hopeful.  I am no longer hopeful.  It is our generation that comprises Fox News’ largest audience segment, with the median viewing age being in their late 60s.  An impressive majority of those over 65 voted for Trump.  When will we ever learn?  And here we go – blundering into Iran, killing people and bulldozing flowers, while the entire world holds its breath and hopes there are not radioactive repercussions in addition to the disastrous economic impacts.

Seeger’s question can be looked at in two ways.  We could refer to each individual one of us.  We have all had the experience of watching someone in our lives make the same mistake (the friend who marries the same kind of man) over and over again. We do it ourselves.  We say, after the fact, that we should have known better – and yet.

But the we is also collective.  Our country has made the same mistakes over and over again.  Viet Nam apparently didn’t teach us anything; nor did the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Despite extensive postmortems after these initiatives… we do it again.  Off we march with optimistic hopes to spread democracy and make the world safer for mankind.  But there is no democracy and the world is less and less safe.  And we kill our own as well as theirs – the difference is that they kill our soldiers, while we kill men, women, children – whoever is in our way.  And now we are saying that even the most rudimentary (and humane) rules of war do not apply to us.

S. Eliot wrote a wonderful play about the death of Thomas Becket called Death in the Cathedral. In a key moment, as his death approaches, we get these lines from Beckett:

We do not know very much of the future

Except that from generation to generation

The same things happen again and again.

Men learn little from others’ experience.

But in the life of one man, never

The same time returns.  Sever

The cord, shed the scale.  Only

The fool, fixed in his folly, may think

He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

“Men learn little from others’ experience.”  A depressingly true statement.

And then there are the last lines, which seem to sum up the whole problem: “The fool, fixed in his folly, may think he can turn the wheels on which he turns.”  It seems to me that we have become more and more foolish.  Washington thinks it can fix our problems by killing people.  Silicon Valley thinks they can overcome aging and death.  And here we sit as children are bombed, people die for lack of health insurance, and innocent children go to detention camps.

One more example.  Scientists have had a pretty good idea that global warming was happening and what was causing it since at least 1938 when Guy Callendar assembled statistics going back into the 19^th century.  And even if we didn’t believe in global warming, we knew that the availability of oil and gas was a disruptive factor, particularly when the gas shortages of the 1970s (1973 kicked off by an Arab embargo after the Yom Kippur war, and 1979 set off by the Iranian Revolution) Our generation sat in line for enough fuel to at least get us to work. (We were hippies no longer.)  There was much talk about alternative energy sources at that point – over 40 years ago!  Clearly no lessons were learned.  And the planet, indeed, has suffered.  Where have all the flowers gone?

Our generation did learn some things.  We stopped smoking, we learned to use a PC (and a cell phone, a tablet, and a smart TV).  We learned how to support ourselves (more or less), and we learned to exercise – and we learned that a little discipline is not always a bad thing.  But we didn’t learn how to stop wars, greed, and amoral leadership.

In her book about aging (The Last Gift of Time), Carolyn Heilbrun suggests that the young can learn little from the old, but the old can learn from the young.  I am not ready to learn from Generation Z, but maybe we could all profit from learning from our younger selves.  We thought we could change things.  Perhaps we need to tap into our long-gone hippie selves and see what is left of a generation that genuinely thought that the answer to “when will we ever learn?” was “when our generation is in charge.”  Oh, the pity!  And surely our generation is in charge.  Old people rule our country, elders who have not gotten wise like the ancient Yoda, but only wrinkled and bald like him.  (Of course, Yoda had 900 years to learn what he knew, a luxury of time neither we nor our planet has.)

As Eliot has the chorus say at the end of Murder in the Cathedral, “Lord, have mercy on us.”