One of the notable aspects of real estate (and other related endeavors) is that when one seeks to know how much something is worth, one has to seek comparables. When we try to do the same thing with our present times, the results are all bad. No matter what aspect of contemporary life we seek to pick in order to compare it with something else, the result is bad. What makes our times so bad is not only what happens in them, but that whatever sort of direction we look leads to reflect upon the bad in the future, and this is so even if one is not inclined to slippery slopes and the like.

Let us consider the comparables. In Australia people without vaccines have been sent to concentration camps, and German shopkeepers have expressed in Nazi-like fashion their disinclination to serve those without worthless covid vaccines in language that is remarkably familiar to those who remember the late 1930’s and similar sentiments being said about Jews. This is so even as one notable self-professed vaccine maker who has desired to keep their data private for seventy-five years has been found to be twice as fatal due to heart complications as a result of the inflammation caused by the shot than the lives the shot is supposed to have saved from covid, so far (to say nothing of longer term results). If all of this medical experimentation and the creation of pariahs whom no nation particularly wants to deal with seems like the late 1930’s, you aren’t the only one who feels that way.

There are other ways that it feels like the late 1930’s, especially when one hears the ominous drums of war in places like Ukraine and Taiwan, and our feckless leadership (and a populace that, understandably, has no particularly strong appetite for war) ponders new ways to be craven and cowardly when it comes to appeasing dictators while facing the possibility that all it may do is strengthen those who wish to attack us anyway on their own terms and not when it would be easiest to stop. And all of this is going on in an atmosphere of self-inflicted economic distress, in an atmosphere that reminds one of the 1930’s or the 1970’s, if one wishes to account for the penchant that contemporary nations have for boycotting the Olympics over foreign policy issues.

In the United States, for example, it has become clear that our own political scene is becoming increasingly divided between increasingly hostile groups of people. It is all too easy to think of these times as being similar to the 1850’s, when such division led to the Civil War, but it is also not unlike the age of yellow journalism in the 1890’s that led to the Spanish-American War and the outbreak of American imperialism by do-gooder Progressives intent on uplifting the world and making them like us, a mission that many have continued on long after losing confidence in the United States as a whole and remaining confident only about an increasingly small and demanding corrupt cultural and political elite.

It does not matter which comparable you pick. What crisis do you want to look at? What failing institution reminds you of some sort of failing institution in the past? All of them are bad. All of them are ominous. An unrighteous and unjust age as our own cannot help but stumble on towards its judgment. Any knowledge of history provides us with all kinds of pitfalls that we are falling into, and it does not take a great degree of knowledge to recognize the storms that approach.