The boasted privilege of freemen under the direction of political power to be exercised by a single individual, would seem to be adopted by an Administration of Independence security of the object for which may be destroy or keep down a bad passion of our free institutions and prejudices, so long will the States governing a common with every other citizen; and although the medium of the elective franchise. If such could not, I conceive, have been the pleasure of the people but that the enactment should never be used with greater effect for unhallowed union of the whole country for generosity and nobleness of feeling may be destroyed by the respects the aggregate people of the Federal Government, the accountable agent, not a vestige of the people to be most stupid men in England spoke of "their American subjects. It looks to the aggrandizement of the Territories of the Constitution or because errors had been committed by anyone who has blessed us by the gifts of combinations violative of the elective governments arises from this high place to which I shall be exerted to prevent the formation of political privileges, and this seems to be the corner stone upon which our American citizens requiring compliance with entire control the free operations as the genuine spirit of liberty is the spirit of freedom, and as long as the understanding. The citizen; and although devoted republican principles which separate the evils which have been that under no circumstances of their own constant nurture. To the never-dying worm in his attempts have been made, hitherto justice which the Constitution, "all the liberties of the State governments, of the scheming politician dissipated, and, avoiding the democrat of Athens with them, and as long as they might deceive and flattered with greater error in the bosoms of those feelings which belong to the President to communicate information and prudent administration not to have prepared it agreeably to his will and the lesser Asia would furnish the larger dividend.
The text above was generated using the PHP Markov chain text generator at http://projects.haykranen.nl/markov/demo/ using the inaugural address of William Henry Harrison as the input text and a 7th-order Markov chain.
Note the dream-like quality of the text. Short pieces of it tend to make some kind of sense, but longer stretches are incoherent. It is what Macbeth claimed life to be: "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The incoherence is due to the fact that the text was generated from probabilities based on only the past few words; there is no long-term memory, let alone actual thought.
The same applies to societies as a whole, because at no time do we have more than a few generations living simultaneously, and most of a nation's past will have happened before living memory. Each new generation has some hope or ambition of correcting what it sees as the most obvious, insupportable, or insufferable wrongs -- wrongs it will typically see as being the consequences of choices by the generation immediately previous. A generation or two further back is likely to be seen through rose-colored glasses, in part due to the contrast with the generation of one's parents; generations even further back, never having been met, are scarcely thought of, much less understood.
Yes, we have books and (now) recordings, but these are no substitute for experience, or even for simply getting to know someone who has had the direct experience. Think of it this way: it is one thing to watch a movie about a love story, but it is another to actually fall in love; it is one thing to watch a YouTube video that shows the view from the front seat of a roller coaster, but it is another to ride the roller coaster. There was even something special about hearing stories from my Great Uncle Mitchell about driving trucks across France to bring supplies to the troops pushing in on Germany, or meeting Mike Jacobs, Holocaust survivor and founder of the Holocaust museum in Dallas. Both those good men are gone now, and their generation will soon be altogether gone; and books and videos cannot fill the hole they leave.
So what do we lose with the passing of generations, except for stories? I suspect the most important thing we lose is the experience to know how to react to new evils as they arise. Sometimes it is best to mind our own business and let events play out, since intervention is likely to cause more problems than it solves; sometimes it is best to speak up; sometimes it is best to watch quietly and prepare to act if some threshold is passes; sometimes it is best to act forcefully and decisively. Those who have lived through multiple crises should be better judges of which hills it is worth dying on, figuratively or even literally -- of when it really is a good day to die, and when it is not.
The second most important thing we lose is experience in recognizing idealistic rubbish. In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton asks, "Does anybody in the world believe that a soldier says, 'My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm water port in the Gulf of Finland! Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, 'If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments; but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen!" No person of mature judgment would say that, obviously, but history shows that people -- especially young people -- often really do fall for propaganda because they lack the experience to detect a con or even to recognize the correct priorities; after all, it is mostly young people who commit suicide over a failed romance or due to online bullying.
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