Lyndon B. Johnson's Essay 'Our Failure, Our Duty'

The first noticeable concept that caught my eye in the essay was “nobody ever lived in the past”. I don’t ever think about this since we always know how the story ends, but we don’t know how our own stories end, and neither did those in the past. The best example I can think of for this situation is the assassination of President Kennedy. President Kennedy had no idea that he be would assassinated in 1963, because at that time it was the present. His vice president Lyndon B. Johnson could not have predicted that he would become the most influential and powerful person in the world, the President of the United States of America. Life happens and people have to adapt without knowing what will happen days, even seconds, ahead of the time they are in. In the same respect the essay then talks about how we are quick to judge those of the past. Many scrutinize President Johnson for his final decision on the Vietnam war. But in truth, he never asked to have to make that decision, he was put into that position and acted to the best …show more content…
The concept I took from these paragraphs is a reason history is important. That reason is that things we learn in history can, at many times, be applicable today. In the text it talks of a bridge built in 1914 that in describing the bridge say, “we could not do it any better today, and probably not as well”. So if we don’t look into history for solutions of today then the figurative “bridge” we create tomorrow could be worse than the one we overlooked made 100 years ago. An example in history of this is sewage treatment systems. The same basic system has been used to dispose of sewage and water since the middle of the 19th century. Had someone ignored the old well working system and started from scratch in 2000, they would have been throwing away a perfectly usable well working system of waste disposal and creating an un-needed new