Did you know that the Earth has, perhaps, as little 5,000,000 years left to live (EDIT: My mistake; the current hypothesis suggest about 1 billion or so years left)? Perhaps that seems like a long time, but if you consider that she's been inhabited for some 4.5 billion years, this news might strike you as comparable to a senior citizen being told that their heart will stop beating in a year's time (it does to me, anyway).
5,000,000,000 years is a lot of human generations, but the vault we borrow from is never bottomless, and someone at some point had best be able to say, "We're not taking another step back. We just don't have the time."
My thoughts are that it may as well be us.
The political field in the United States today is, frankly, terrifying. One one hand you have very much center-right conservatives who are content with the status quo, and they stand as the reasonable foil to their opposition, who are on the extreme right end of the spectrum and screaming for either the end times or, if we really insist on not extinguishing our species right this minute, at least returning to a period of feudal desperation and superstition.
It's ironic that they should be the ones accusing the present administration in their nation of fascism, given that their strategies differ from those of the blossoming Third Reich to only the slightest of degrees. They are actively participating in sedition! Fox News, their propaganda arm, has repeatedly suggested in recent weeks that violent force be used to instigate an insurrection and appoint the likes of beauty pageant contestants, radical Christian extremists and mixes between the two as the ruling members of parliament!
The world does not have time for this. We don't have time to listen to what ignorant clothing models think our priorities need to be (much less the time to dignify such thoughts with experimentation), we don't have time to 'teach both sides', we don't have time to ever more be digging just one more plot for the vainly dead (whether by means of military conquest, absence of medical care, lack of nutrition or any number of other grotesque failings that haunt the United States among innumerable other nation states).
We need expertise and we need ambition, we need it in spades and we need it now. If present day America is a sign of things to come, it is not an encouraging sign. That Sarah Palin has not been laughed off of the campaign trail, that Richard Cheney is not currently occupying a jail cell or a padded room in an asylum, that Glenn Beck is offered premiere air time and gathers a loyal audience is all something that should inspire horror and fury on a nearly moment-to-moment basis - if you find that it does not, I fear that 5,000,000,000 years will pass us by all too quickly.
Nobody in the Weimar Republic's administration took Adolf Hitler seriously (least of all Chancellor Franz von Papen), even after he threatened several of them at gunpoint during the Beer Hall Putsch - but only ten years and one Night of Long Knives later, and 'the austrian corporal' had complete control over Germany, and would exert this control to plunge the world into a cannibalistic furor.
World War II happened 70 years ago now, long before channels like the Internet were available for sewing propaganda and when the modern weapons of warfare were in their infancy. What may be reaped the next time we decide to simply pretend that legitimacy is owed to a plainly insane political ideology is not something I care to see materialized.
There is so much for us to learn, to experience and to accomplish yet, and little (if any) time left to continue yielding to manias of any sort. Continuing to do so is a recipe for failure, and at stake are the answers to our most fundamental questions about ourselves and the space that we occupy.