Day after New Year's Day is significant

Every American knows that in 18 days our nation will hold its presidential inauguration. And virtually the entire world knows the history making fact that President-elect Barack Obama will be the first African-American to hold this office, giving cause for this day to be doubly important.
Due to the imperative nature of this occasion, it seems appropriate to address it in both today's column as well as the one to appear on Jan. 16. But let me digress and begin with today's (Jan. 2) significance.
On a day in which most of us aspire merely to return to our routines in the aftermath of the holiday season, who would ever have thought that the day after New Years Day would ever be significant?
To start with, allow me to remind you of one of the most oft quoted phrases from philosophy:
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." — George Santayana.
Actually the whole of what Santayana said was even more insightful, "Progress, far from consisting of change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Such words should ever stay before our minds in the same manner as frontlets for sacred scriptures were worn on their foreheads of ancient Hebrews. Each day's headlines of the latest violence, whether in India, Iraq or Charlotte, reminds us that the human race never seems to learn lessons from past failures.
Jan. 2 is a day to remember another great American — another African-American — by the name of Frederick Douglass. On Jan. 2, 1893, Douglas delivered an address at the dedication of the Haitian Pavilion at the Columbian Exposition (better known as the Chicago's World Fair) entitled "Lecture on Haiti."
Among several points he made was the declaration: "We should not forget that the freedom you and I enjoy today is largely due to the brave stand taken by others years ago striking for freedom. They struck for the freedom of every man in the world."
If I understand his words correctly, Douglass was conveying the thought that liberty is not so much a political state achieved at a specific moment in time and maintained as a constant throughout an era of history so much as it is a human progression with impediments and surges, sacrifices and fulfillments.
Each succeeding generation is the beneficiary of the achievements won by the self-sacrifices of a preceding generation's sacrifice.
We may easily grasp intellectually that we today enjoy freedoms bought with the sacrifices that others made yesteryear. However, the constantly potential danger of liberty's limitation for future generations lies in our lack of willingness to sacrifice on our watch of history. This peril can never be over estimated. Our guard should never be eased.
Douglass also had other insights that largely were ignored by his audience, but when scrutinized, give him an aura of clairvoyance.
Among his discernments on that occasion was the encouragement of the people to trust the value of commerce as well as to embrace the future with optimism. Furthermore, he spoke of the wisdom of establishing positive relations with other countries and, probably most unexpectedly, expounded that the future of the Haitians depended largely upon the role of its women.
Today Haiti is known as one of the two most impoverished countries in the Western hemisphere. Haiti's rulers isolated their small nation from other countries, did not trouble themselves to encourage its population in commerce and largely relegated women to roles of virtual slavery. Needless to say even more than a century later its future is quite bleak.
Frederick Douglass' words were insightful and his advice invaluable. But when we ignore our capable leaders as they did, we suffer the consequences of Santayana's discernment. We repeat the past.

Johnny A. Phillips is the Clinical Chaplain of the J. Iverson Riddle Developmental Center.