day no. 17,267: an idiot's paradise

Then the idiot who praises,

with enthusiastic tone

All centuries but this, 

and every country but his own;

— Gilbert and Sullivan's "I've Got a Little List"

The idiot would be happy to live in any place but here at any other time. He lauds cultures of peoples he does not know and the times and places of lands he has never visited. But that is for fools. God has made each man for his own time.

Acts 17:26

God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.

God has called us to honor our fathers and mothers and the lands from which they came and He has called us to bless our sons and daughters by making it easy for them to honor us.

“People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.” — Thomas Babington Macaulay

The idiot ignores his present duties not only when he ignores his ancestors, but also when he obsesses over them. In the first instance, hes refuses to honor his fathers and mothers and in the second instance, he refuses to be where God has determined him to be. In his arrogance, he thinks there is another time or place that would have been better for him. He will not bloom where He has been planted.

"Men cannot give a meaning to history that they themselves lack, nor can they honor a past which indicts them for their present failures." — R.J. Rushdoony, The Biblical Philosophy of History

The idiot forsakes the present while praising the past. It is not that the past is not praiseworthy, but that he demonstrates his ignorance of their virtue by refusing to do what they did. They did not live in the past, they lived in their present and they did noble things worthy of being remembered and lauded. They did not sit around despising their circumstances. They got to work and did something worth remembering. The idiot remembers only the good that they did, but he forgets that they blessed him, their descendant, by honoring their own ancestors in working hard in their own time.

The present is always an idiot's paradise, not because there is anything particularly wrong about the present, but because the idiot thinks he can enjoy today by forsaking the past and ignoring the future.