Victor Davis Hanson. He's good.

What happened to history?

Our society suffers from the tyranny of the present. Presentism is the strange affliction of assuming we ourselves created all our good things -- as if those without our technology who came before us lacked our superior knowledge and morality.

We naturally speak of our own offspring in reverential tones. Do this or that 'for the children' -- youth who are the most affluent and leisured in the history of civilization. A new Medicare prescription drug benefit will add a mountain of national debt. Yet contemporary 'seniors' as a group, even apart from the largess of Social Security and Medicare, are already the most insured cohort in our society.

He concludes (almost):

Reverence for those who came before us ensures humility about our own limitations. It restores confidence that far worse crises than our own -- slavery, the great flu epidemic, or World War II -- were endured with far less resources.