"The Good Old Days"...were they really that good, and are they really that long gone?

When I signed up for Rhetoric and Civic Life at New Student Orientation, I didn't know what rhetoric was.  After about a week and a half in this class, I still don't really know what rhetoric is.  All I knew was that I had to take this class to fulfill my Paterno Fellows requirements.  That's pretty much still the only thing that I know regarding this class.  Writing isn't exactly my forte, so when I heard we had to write a blog, let alone two blogs, the eye rolling and groaning ensued.  I had no idea what I was supposed to write about for the Passion Blog, and I really didn't want to think about writing every single week.

As I mentioned before, I don't know what rhetoric is.  I don't know how it relates to civic life, and I certainly don't know how to adequately blog.  However, I do know that I love history.  I've had a real passion for history for about a year and a half now.  As I learned more about history, I discovered that the people of the past are pretty similar to us in 2016.  Grant it, they obviously went about their daily lives in a different fashion and they probably held things to different standards of importance than we do now, but the same basic human nature was there.  In general, most people seem to regard past civilizations as erudite and grand, or at the very least better than us, but that isn't always the case.

For my Passion Blog, I would like to write about history.  History can be really interesting, I promise.  Each week, I will write about a different interesting historical moment, and then I will go on to explain a human trait or "life lesson", for lack of a better term, that we can derive from these points in history.  I hope to show you that the "good old days" never really existed, in a way, because we're living them.