Every day, we lose more than a thousand veterans and with them the wisdom of age and lessons of history. American culture puts a huge premium on youth and beauty and even on inexperience and naiveté, but it is hard to see how any of these traits have utility in making us prosperous and safe. To be sure, it is more pleasant to hear platitudes from vibrant, attractive people with hairless, sculpted bodies than it is to hear the unvarnished truth from someone with a leather face and less glibness than experience, but older people are more likely to speak with authority.
And with passion, too, for the older we get the more we recognize that, when the day is gone, it is gone forever and it can’t be retrieved. So there is an urgency to the things that mature people say, which is why they talk incessantly and won’t shut up. So much of their lives have already passed that they don’t have enough time left to recount the lessons in it. And they are worried that you aren’t listening, which is why they tell the same stories, and deliver the same aphorisms, over and over again.
If it seems that we keep making the same mistakes, it is because we pay insufficient attention to people who have been through it all at least once before. In the end, we will survive rather than perish not because we accumulate comfort and luxury but because we accumulate wisdom.
– Col. Jack Jacobs (Ret.), a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient (and Douglas Century)
from their book “If Not Now, When?“
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