A Longer Point of View
I just finished the book Roads to Santiago that was an interesting and quite cultural book on Spain- it's history, culture, and faith. It was worth reading for the chapter on the artist Velazquez and the one on Cervantes and Don Quijote. But something else overwhelmed me as I was reading. It was the sense of time. Long amounts of time.

It first hit me when he referred to a particular battle in the 12th Century that was the beginning of the end of the "reconquest" of Spain by the Christians from the Moors. I stopped and thought, How can that be? The reconquest wasn't finished until the 15th Century. That's 300 years. Then I realized that he had said that the reconquest BEGAN within a relatively few years after the conquest by Islam of the Iberian Peninsula. And that was in the 8th Century.

Here we have a campaign, the Reconquista that lasts SEVEN CENTURIES- 700 years- the final stage of which was almost half the total time span. Let me see, 700 years ago the Europeans from whom I am descended didn't even know that America existed! Then, 300 years ago European North America was barely a strip of land along the Atlantic Ocean. Our history as a nation is shorter than the "last stage" of the Spanish "reconquest."

I can't think in those terms very easily. Most humans can't, of course. But I have a hunch that we Americans are particularly guilty of this problem. Our national history isn't long enough. In great historical terms, we are barely teenagers- the punk, new kids on the global block. Our superpower status is still shorter in time than Spain's was.

Now it is obvious that the countries or people with really long histories don't make decisions any better than we do. But it does give them a persepctive on which to judge history and events that we don't have yet.