Will We Ever Learn?

"What has been will be again.  What has been done will be done again.  There is nothing new under the sun."  Ecclesiastes 1:9

Rewind to a time around the early 1960's.  We are in a small town restaurant, possibly on a Friday evening.  Dad, Mother and myself. I'm quite young, but neither of my older sisters are with us, so I must have been around the age of seven or eight.  Quite an impressionable age.  

We are sitting in a booth.  Behind the booth in the corner is a pinball machine.  Something I do not believe I had ever seen before.  At the end of the machine was a young man who seemed hellbent on a mission of some sort, but I was not sure exactly what kind of mission it was.  The pinball machine fascinated me.  It had bells and buzzers and lots of flashing lights.  The young man would lunge against the machine with all his might, while pressing buttons on each side that made the paddles under the glass top swat wildly at a small steel ball.  I was totally immersed in this display of man vs. machine.  I do not recall what the man looked like, but I do remember one particular thing about him.  He had tattoos on his arms.

There were two parental "truths" I learned that evening.  Pinball machines were only for young men who roamed the streets with no supervision or plan for their life and tattoos just confirmed that in writing, no pun intended.  In other words, I was to avoid both, forever.

Fast-forward to present day.  I'm sitting in a local restaurant.  It is a Tuesday evening and therefore it is taco Tuesday.  My young friend, Jazzy and I are seated in a booth.  Jazzy has a tattoo of Beetlejuice  that runs from the top of her shoulder to her elbow. If you do not know who Beetlejuice is, please google it, there is not space here to explain.  It is a dark work of art, but, that is just my opinion and it is not the only visible tattoo she has.  While we are sitting in the booth, waiting the arrival of our tacos, two young girls stop and tell Jazzy how much they love her tattoo.  This is not the first time this has happened.  Actually, it happens every time we are together in a public place.  Later that evening, my husband and I were discussing how, in the not too distant future, it will be an oddity if one does not have a tattoo.

There is an ancient Hindu text called the Mahabharata.  Within that text is a story that happened over 5000 years ago.  It is a story of a war among two civilizations.  It goes on to tell about a weapon that had never been used before and describes what happened when the weapon was used. This particular story came from a part of the text known as the Bhagavad Gita.  No one understood the meaning of the description because there was nothing to compare it to.  Then, in the mid 1940's, a man by the name of Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, stated, after watching the detonation of the first atomic bomb, a line from the Bhagavad Gita, "I am become death.  The destroyer of worlds."  He was later asked how it felt to be the  person to make the first atomic bomb and his answer was, "Well, not the first atomic bomb."

According to the old scripture, there is nothing new under the sun. What has happened will happen again.  Things come and things go.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could learn to not be so judgmental, be told some of the real truths of our past and learn that we do not need to repeat it?