Passage IV

Clouds and Their Silver Linings

The following paragraphs may or may not be in the most logical order. Each paragraph is numbered in brackets, and item 60 will ask you to choose the most logical placement for Paragraph 4.

[1]

History is not merely remembering the good that came before. What's nostalgia.Small doses of nostalgia may be harmless but enough, anything beyond that can get awfully dangerous awfully fast. (48)

[2]

A culture willing to confront its flaws, can begin to find remedies for it. The American Revolution involving the original thirteen colonies was the outgrowth of a focused attack on an unjust system. The same goes for the abolition, women's rights, and civil rights movements. In contrast, every constructive social movement in United States history has resulted less from preening over successes than from examining failures.

[3]

More recently, American culture during the 1980s, typified by the popular song "Don't Worry, Be Happy," fostered a host of domestic problems. Many health experts will tell you that if our leaders had initially taken the AIDS epidemic seriously, the disease would not be the problem that it is today. And many economists will tell you that the savings-and-loan scandal, which will cost United States taxpayers more than the entire Vietnam War, could only have occurred during a time of irresponsible confidence, when too many people wanted to ignore any negative information.

[4]

Sadly, the converse is equally true: a culture that blinds itself to flaws and dwells on the positive can create serious trouble for itself. Many historians believe that the self-indulgence and nationalism of the 1920s, for example, led directly to the Great Depression, which entertained breadlines and dust bowls.

[5]

As the philosopher George Santayana said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." In their effort to dwell on only the upbeat aspects of history, the people peddling like in nostalgia are distorting the past, and remembering it. The more distorted our past becomes, the more doomed we are to repeat it. Or, to put it another way, the more we look at the silver lining and ignore the clouds, the more likely we are to be caught in the rain with no umbrella.