VIEWPOINT: Looking backward, looking forward, is there a difference?

By Armstrong Williams

Looking backward over 2023 and looking forward to 2024 recalls ancient wisdom. Ecclesiastes: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr employed different phraseology: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Lord Byron in “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage” put it this way: “History, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page.” The choreography and personalities change, but the human narrative remains the same.

The anticipated similarities between this past year and the new year are striking.

To start, the national debt continues to soar past a staggering $33 trillion with $1-2 trillion annual budget deficits forecast as far as the eye can see. Moreover, the multitrillion-dollar military-industrial complex continues with its 800 military bases abroad, with special forces in virtually every country in the world, fighting as a belligerent or co-belligerent without a constitutionally required congressional declaration of war in countries like Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Gaza, Ukraine, Iraq and Syria, and against alleged terrorists everywhere in the world. These pointless wars irrelevant to the national security of the United States provoke blowback and divert valuable resources necessary for invincible self-defense.