The Lens of the Present

In a thread about taking down the statues and stuff like that, I saw somebody comment “When will we stop viewing the past through the lens of the present.”
Well, never. We are in the present and that is the lens we look through. If we try to look at the past through the lens of the future, that just distorts things and makes them go all wobbly and blurry, and if we try to view them through the lens of the past, as historians try to do, we are mostly speculating.
We can make adjustments to that lens, calibrations and compensations, but it’s still the lens of the present. That’s where we are.
The future will judge us through the lens of the future, which they will call the present. Maybe they will blame us for letting the planet die. Maybe they will blame us for blowing the planet up.
The best we can do, to avoid being judged harshly, is to have those values, and promote and work on those values, that will bring us into the best future possible. But, it probably won’t be enough.
If the Earth in 2300 is a smoldering hellscape, we will be regarded as the bad guys, just as Jefferson is being condemned today for being a slave fucker. And so we should be. Live with that.