Hugh Cares

Someone sent me a tweet from Hugh Laurie.  I don't usually bother with what celebrities think about politics, but he's saying something a lot of people believe is an important point:

For every hour we spend agonising over societal crimes of the past, we should probably allow a minute or two to wonder what we're doing now that will be similarly condemned a hundred year hence.  Climate, obviously; animal rights, likewise.  What else?

Hugh, I respect you as a performer, but this is pretty stupid.  Here are some other things we're doing now that plenty of people believe we should worry about for the future--excessive government spending, abortion, the spread of socialism.  I could list hundreds of others, of course, but I have to ask you, will you now be spending any time worrying about my list?  Or will you perhaps realize that claiming you know what people will believe in the future is simply an obnoxious way of arguing about what we believe today. (And by the way, those jerks in the future will likely get us wrong--just as we misunderstand the past when we condemn it wholesale--so screw 'em.)

And as a side note, I don't know about "agonizing" (which is how we spell it) over societal crimes of the past.  You can study them and be aware of mistakes that were made, but I don't know if agonizing helps anyone, since you can't change the past.