Imagine someone trying to drive a car forward while looking at the rear view mirror. Doing this will only take one backwards, our country is hell-bent on mimicking this backward-looking driver.
Whether it is in the economic field, in development or in education, we are in a state of confusion with our desire to move forward while also preserving our past and traditions.
Our education depends too much on memorization, repetition and learning by rote. It views innovativeness as odd.
By refusing to take the risk of innovation, our education builds a retroactive person with retrograde thoughts; a person whose only mission in life is to repeat the past, even when he thinks of the future.
Our past, traditions, heritage, language and religion are, undoubtedly, our primary sources of inspiration, and any attempt to ignore them will do us no good.
Following in the footsteps of our ancestors is not a bad thing to do. The bad thing, however, is for us to do this in a blind manner that prevents us from innovating.
Relying totally on the past will not help us keep up with the developments that are happening in the present and reach the future. That is why it is reasonable to say that by looking only at the rear view mirror, our country will enter an endless, dark tunnel. We need our past to learn from it, but we also need the future in order to move ahead.
By thinking only of the past, we will bring ourselves nothing but tragedies and sectarian strife. We need to learn from the successes of the past. Then we can build on these successes to make a good future for all of us. Justice and equality must be the pillars on which our society is built in the future.
Does the Chamber of Commerce still look at the past? Does it make plans for the future? Has anybody tried to think of solutions for traffic jams on our roads in order to save our time and effort?
The more we look forward, the better will be our life. If we look forward, we will be able to find solutions to our problems. This will make our life better in future.
But in order to solve our problems, we have to find out the reasons that ushered in these problems. This means we must learn from the past and apply a new vision in the future without repeating the mistakes of the past.
Driving forward by looking at the rear view mirror can be good only if we learn from the mistakes of the past in order to avoid repeating those mistakes and the consequent criticism in future.
We are badly in need of decision-makers who have the courage to innovate and think out of the box in order to help us lead a better life in future, a life that has nothing of the mistakes of the past.
