The Unprovoked Past: Why History Is Not Ours to Toy With

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/11/the_unprovoked_past_why_history_is_not_ours_to_toy_with.html

New York City has just elected a socialist mayor—Zohran Mamdani—whose platform promises free rent, government-owned grocery stores, universal childcare, and sweeping tax hikes on the wealthy. To many, this feels like progress. To others, it feels like déjà vu. But to those who remember history, it feels like a warning. This election is not just a political shift. It is a cultural moment, a signal that one of the most iconic cities in the world has chosen to provoke history without understanding its weight. The people of New York have voted for socialism, not as a theory, but as a governing reality. And in doing so, they have revealed a generational fracture that runs deeper than policy. It is a fracture in memory.

Regardless of age, whether young or old, our perception of history begins at birth. The events we live through shape our understanding of the world in ways that books and lectures cannot replicate. Anything that occurred before we were born is not a lived experience, but a secondhand account: something we’ve read, heard, or been told. And while these stories may inform us, they rarely imprint us with the same emotional weight as events we’ve personally endured.

This is why generational differences run so deep. Each cohort sees history through the lens of its own lifetime. The wars, recessions, revolutions, and cultural shifts they felt become their compass. Everything before that is a map drawn by someone else. And when younger generations provoke history, reviving old ideologies, romanticizing failed systems, or dismissing ancestral warnings—they often do so without the visceral memory that tempers idealism with caution.

The Luxury of Forgetting

In the Western world, particularly in the United States, prosperity has become so normalized that its origins are forgotten. The younger generation has grown up in a society of abundance: clean water, digital access, food security, and personal freedom. These luxuries are assumed, not earned. They are inherited without memory. But prosperity is not permanent. It is not the default state of civilization. It is the fragile fruit of freedom, sacrifice, and moral restraint. It did not emerge from socialism, communism, or Marxist theory. It was built on the belief that human beings are endowed by their Creator with rights that no government can grant or revoke. It was sustained by the free market, by personal responsibility, and by the painful lessons of history. To forget this is to provoke history, to challenge its verdicts without reading its pages.

The Idolization of Socialism

Millennials and Gen Z—often called the “prosperity generations�, have grown up in an era of relative peace, technological marvels, and economic convenience. They’ve never known ration lines, government bread queues, or the fear of state surveillance. Their understanding of hardship is shaped more by emotional stress and digital overload than by systemic oppression or material scarcity. And so, when they hear the promises of socialism, free healthcare, free college, guaranteed housing, they often respond with enthusiasm. Not because they are malicious or foolish, but because they lack the historical context to recognize the cost. They do not see socialism as a system of control. They see it as compassion. They do not associate it with gulags or economic collapse. They associate it with equity and kindness.

But this is the great illusion. Socialism sounds generous until you ask who pays. It sounds fair until you ask who decides. It sounds modern until you realize it’s been tried, and failed, many times before.

Freedom Misunderstood

What many in the younger generation do not fully appreciate is the freedom they already possess. The freedom to speak, to dissent, to innovate, to build, to fail and try again. These freedoms are not granted by the state, they are protected from the state. They are the foundation of the free market, the engine of prosperity, and the reason their lives are filled with options. Under socialism, these freedoms are not expanded, they are exchanged. The state becomes the arbiter of fairness. Innovation is replaced by allocation. Ingenuity is replaced by conformity. And prosperity is replaced by dependence. The irony is painful: the very system that gave them the prosperity to dream of utopia is the system they now seek to dismantle.

The Exodus of Ingenuity

And here lies the practical danger. When a society begins to punish success, through excessive taxation, burdensome regulation, and ideological hostility, the successful leave. Not out of spite, but out of necessity. Innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors are not bound by borders. They can take their capital, their creativity, and their companies elsewhere.

History has shown this repeatedly. When governments overreach, wealth flees. When regulation suffocates, innovation dies. And when the state promises everything, it eventually owns everything, and produces nothing.

What remains is a population expecting free preschool, free rent, free groceries, and government-owned everything. But the people who were supposed to fund it, the builders, the dreamers, the risk-takers, are gone. They took their money, their ingenuity, and their ambition with them. And the utopia collapses under the weight of its own entitlement.

The Fragility of Freedom

Freedom is not self-sustaining. It must be defended, understood, and passed down with care. The systems that protect freedom, free speech, free markets, religious liberty, are not perfect. But they are better than the alternatives. They allow dissent. They allow innovation. They allow failure and redemption. Socialism and communism, by contrast, promise equality but deliver control. They speak of justice but silence opposition. They offer security at the price of the soul. These systems do not fail because they are poorly implemented. They fail because they are built on a flawed understanding of human nature, one that denies agency, suppresses individuality, and replaces God with government. To flirt with these ideologies without understanding their history is to provoke forces that have already proven their cruelty.

The Role of Elders and Storytellers

In every healthy society, elders are not just respected, they are consulted. Their memories are not just tolerated, they are treasured. They serve as living bridges between past and present, warning of dangers and reminding us of hard-won truths. But in today’s culture, elders are often dismissed as outdated, irrelevant, or problematic. Their stories are seen as obstacles to progress rather than anchors of wisdom. This generational disconnect is not just emotional, it is existential. Without the guidance of those who remember, we are left to repeat what they endured. This is why storytelling matters. This is why legacy matters. This is why we must dramatize history, not to glorify the past, but to protect the future.

A Call to Historical Humility

To provoke history is to assume it has nothing left to teach. To ignore its warnings is to believe we are immune to its consequences. But we are not. We are vulnerable. We are forgetful. And we are often seduced by the very ideas that once enslaved others. Historical humility is not weakness, it is wisdom. It is the recognition that we are not the first to dream of justice, equity, or reform. It is the courage to ask: Has this been tried before? What happened? Who paid the price?

If we do not ask these questions, we will provoke history. And history, when provoked, does not respond with kindness. It responds with consequence.
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