IN ONE PAGE!

Jill Lepore’s gripping history, “These Truths: A History of the United States” tells the story comprehensively in about 1000 pages. I recommend the book to all who have the patience and time.

But, I worry that not enough people will be able to read it for its powerful messages, to travel far enough to improve enough individual lives.

At the beginning of human time people to survive were ‘required’ by nature to find and create change in their lives.

As they did what nature intended—boy did they create change. The changes they wrought brought about unexpected dimensions of confusion and disruption in their lives until they began to figure out what, as individuals and as a whole, they were actually doing to themselves.

For example, the industrial revolution stirred up the world in the 19th Century, which led to two horrible world wars in the 20^th Century.

In more recent times, now into the 21^st Century, the vast digital based revolution has stirred up the world even more, yes with fewer deaths, but even more confusion?

We individually get lost along the way in ‘petty little’ details such has chemistry, anthropology, physics, astronomy and distribution of wealth—etc., etc.

But, just under the skins of religion, color, fear, ambition, the basic natures of people have never really changed.

We are –with very few exceptions—driven by greed, need for power and satisfaction from attacking other people –simply to seek to ‘better’ our own lives.

While we think we have superficially overcome overwhelming numbers of people, cars, computers and information, we have not yet –at large –learned enough about ourselves to imagine our own ‘little lives’ in the context of change.

Thus, the history of people has failed in its most important need, which is to understand and to adapt our very selves to the world we have wrought.

Nature was very clever. If we ever do succeed in adapting to change, it might just STOP! Beware, since change itself is the very engine of LIFE, what then?