By Lance Winslow
The other day, I noted that one of my neighbors down the block had a garage door open and some ping-pong table set up. I asked them; "are you inviting over some Chinese to do a little international diplomacy and negotiation?" They laughed with me because they understood the reference. The reality is not many would, a good number of younger people in our society were not around when Nixon was president, or they didn't follow the news recently when Warren Buffett went to Asia and played table tennis as part of an international business affair.
One thing I found is that if you study history too much, and if you know too much about it, you are liable to catch people off guard who don't understand those references. They might think you are weird, or even strange, they won't understand what on earth you are talking about. Does this mean we shouldn't study history; because no one will understand the references we talk? No, I think you should study history, and it's unfortunate that more people don't. If they didn't understand the references, but they probably wouldn't make the same mistakes over and over that humans often make.
The pattern doesn't always repeat itself, but all too often it does, history really does repeat, but if you don't study your history, or if you study a false history with politically correct blinders, then I would say that old quote is correct; "you are doomed to repeat." Maybe more people should use such references when they have intellectual conversations in public, and maybe more people who don't understand what they're talking about might ask, maybe in that way we can transfer information to others and subsequent generations can learn from us.
It might be difficult to explain a historical reference in 145 characters in a tweet, but it's not impossible to do in one-on-one conversation, you can learn a lot when you study history, or when you talk to someone who has, even better someone who's lived through it. In fact, you learn more when you talk to people who have lived through it, lived to tell about it, and came back with personal lessons and personal perspectives because of it. It changes the way we live in the future of our society in so many ways.
With all of this said, it doesn't make sense to make people look stupid in public because they don't know what you're talking about, often attorneys do this, and esoteric university professors. It's probably why people don't like to talk to them very much. But everyone likes to hear a story, and when we hear stories we tend to remember them better, sometimes better than even our own history. Please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on the Future of Education. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net
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