The Wheel and the Fire: If Our History Must Rhyme…

What About the Children?

I used to love movie plots where the characters find themselves in one world of a multiverse—superheroes and time machines, interdimensional travel. Sliders, with Jerry O’Connell and its shitty CGI wormhole that sucked them up and spat them out into another terrible world. Most of those possible worlds portrayed were nightmares, and the motives of the characters’ doppelgängers usually countered those of our Earth hero. The contrast between those worlds made me appreciate the one I lived in. But now, I long for an alternate world and its subsequent doppelgänger.

We write about the psychopathic archvillain and play out his schemes. We think sadistically and write salaciously, maniacally reaching inside ourselves to let loose parts of these suppressed worlds with impunity—but we eventually write their end. We know, in our heart of hearts, that the carnage must be brought to a halt. We are acutely aware of the rhythms of the great pendulum swing and the necessary steps to become its counterbalance as writers of a generic world. We know the steps for ascension into a greater good and how to decline, how to erode our created angels, ripping them from righteousness and making them damnable demons.

Fascinating power. Hallucinations at will. Praises and cautions to a real world. But our children sometimes fawn over what we assume is rotten and repellent. We teach them what their options are, narrowing their vision to fit upon the crowded shoulders of giants who had no encouragement or direction. We are unoriginal.

We just update the words to Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire and cement all the horrors as pop culture art—until there is no time left to create. Because that’s all we really have.

When do each of us, individually, kill the child within us? When we selfishly have children, we must find the one we buried inside ourselves long ago. We see what we were and what we were as children. We ask ourselves if we will raise this new child better than our fathers did. I think Mark Twain said, History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

In the grand tapestry of existence, all things are in perpetual motion; energies ebb and flow, weaving the fabric of reality. Just as oceans exhibit their tides—rising to kiss the shore and retreating into the depths—so too do the events of our lives advance and recede. The universe dances to the rhythm of creation and dissolution, a pendulum swinging through the corridors of time, ensuring that every ascent is met with a descent and every dawn follows the darkest night. This eternal cadence reminds us that balance is inherent in all things, and through understanding this, we find harmony within the cosmic symphony.

The world turns in familiar cycles, its wheel grinding down the innocent as history rhymes with cruelty. We have seen this before—tyrants rise wrapped in flags, wealth pools in the hands of the few while the hungry riot in the streets, machines replace workers as progress leaves them behind, and plagues expose the frailty of systems meant to protect. War drums beat again, and the old send the young to die, just as they always have. The past warns, but we do not listen. Now, a lost generation is swallowed whole, children left not with memories to suppress but with no childhood at all—only the knowing, too soon, that the world was never made for them.

The Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the Cold War—each lesson forgotten, each mistake reborn. History repeats because we let it, because those who could have changed its course chose comfort over courage.

And what do you say to the child who cries, not from a skinned knee, but from knowing her future is already ash? What comfort exists for the one whose parents can no longer shield them from the truth? There is no lullaby for this kind of grief, no bedtime story soft enough to ease a stolen childhood. Words mean nothing when the hands meant to protect them are empty. The children of Hiroshima, the sons and daughters of factory collapses, the young voices drowned in the dust of fallen towers—what was said to them?

But maybe there is something beyond words—a refusal to let the wheel crush them, a quiet defiance that says: if history must rhyme, let it end with her rising. Let it end with us giving the children something worth remembering, something worth keeping.

They will say we did all we could. That the world was too complex, the problems too vast, the forces at play beyond any single person’s control. But the children will know better. They will see the bills passed in the dead of night, the hands exchanging wealth while their schools crumble, the leaders who let the sick die to keep the economy alive. They will grow up knowing that their safety was weighed against profit margins, that their voices were silenced by policy and force. And one day, they will understand what we refused to say out loud: that the wheel doesn’t turn on its own. It is pushed. And we have always known who stands behind it.

The fire is coming. Whether it rises from the anger of the unheard, the collapse of what we refused to repair, or the earth itself finally rejecting what we have done to it—something will break. And when it does, when the weight of history presses down once more, there will be no more childhoods left to steal. No more futures left to debate. Just the ruins of what could have been, and the stories of those who had the chance to change it but chose not to. If history must rhyme, then let it be different this time. Let the fire cleanse, not consume. Let the hands that have always turned the wheel be forced to hold the burden of what they have done. Let the child who cries now live to see a world that finally listened.