History never repeats itself, but it sometimes rhymes.

History never repeats itself, but it sometimes rhymes.
That's why people like Nostradamus, hip to the patterns in the verses but always aware of the curse, that we may live in interesting times, can exist, and leave camps of believers shaking their fists at one another, urging each other to dismiss or accept prophecy, when both groups in truth refuse to see that prophets are just noticing patterns.
That's why déjà vu can be surprisingly right, though usually just tells us what we already know: they say that it comes most often when you're doing something familiar... well really?  You mean you get the sensation that you've been somewhere before when you have?  Big surprise there, but sometimes it comes in ways you'd never expect, ne jamais vouloir voir, don't get on that train, stupid, or you'll reach your final destination, says your daemon.
So the consequences of inflation can strike twice when the scythe of Saturn swings perpendicular to the dead planet declared planet no more, and one nation under God, and another once under Alexander Severus can each feel the purse strings tightening around its neck, and look back with furor at the generation that said, "laissez les bon temps rouler," realizing now to our horror that they were rolling into a polluted lake.
So we can look back and see the Weimar republic and compare wheelbarrows to computers, each with a message worth less than its medium, and steel ourselves against totalitarianism, recognizing in the reflection that one Semitic people or another is made pariah by those who seek to write the next line of our world's tale in blood.
Even when we get in the same stupid arguments with our loved ones, friends, or watch reruns with them so that we can get a feel for what heaven will be like, we know that eternity recurs, not as endlessness but as timelessness, and perhaps a little part of us remembers, prays, here for true consonance, there for slant rhyme, and whispers to us, that we might learn rather than weaken from pain.
In truth though, nobody fully knows the meter, cycles of the planets and economic cycles don't explain it all, and we can never know the whole system in all its vast scope or its minute details, so interpretation and expectation are left up to the reader.

Copyright J.K. Strain, 2011.