I agree with Rick: Anyone who gets too worked up over anything needs to realize that in a century, none of it will matter. At all!
Even Rome had a long history of completely mundane crap. We remember maybe one-tenth of one-thousandth of what went on at the time, and only a tenth of that has any bearing whatsoever on our daily lives. We can name Caesar and Graccius and Augustus Octavian as having been Great Men (Really, lucky bastards in the right place at the right time.), but who can recall the baker who took the cobbler to court over a matter of twenty as? Not one goddamned person, and that case may have defined a whole family history for decades. And if so little survived from Rome, what do you think will survive from the asinine cultures of today?
And if you think a century is a long time (it isn’t, kiddies), imagine a thousand years. You can’t, really, but try. In one thousand years, we went from crawling around in filth to global dominance. In one thousand years, the Arabs went from cultural and economic supremacy to becoming the butt of a bad joke, fighting over a strip of desert surrounded by other strips of desert. One thousand years ago, what happened? On the whole, diddly shit. It’s so far removed from our own era to be meaningless. Whole empires have faded into irrelevance.
We try to preserve the past. We honestly do. But when it comes to preserving the lineage of two thousand years of inbred morons who ruled a narrow strip of land by a river, it becomes pointless. Maybe a few names swim to the top: Cleopatra, for fucking Marc Antony; Tut-ankh-amen, for not having been robbed by Arabs after he’d died; Nefertiti, for having had a great bust; and not much else. I’m forgetting some mildly important ones, true, but two thousand years’ worth of vital personages? I think not. And those are the rulers, not the tradesmen or the farmers or the soldiers or anyone who really made the empire run. Those useful blobs faded away a millenia ago.
Even in America’s history, you can easily get by with a few names. Washington, for being the first. Jefferson, for being the most democratic. Lincoln, for preserving the Union. Franklin Roosevelt, for creating the America that would rule the second half of the 20th Century. Reagan, for defining a whole school of political discourse. Nobody else swims to the top. Wilson’s Leage of Nations? Dead and buried and rightfully forgotten. Teddy Roosevelt’s adventurism? Jingoistic bullshit. Kennedy’s Space Program? Damn fool dick contest, and not followed up on properly. (The technology itself was vital, and the spirit of adventurism was useful, but the whole enterprise was doomed from the start. Let’s hope China sparks something more lasting.)
So the next time you feel like fighting, ask yourself this: Who swept up the crap of Beaucephalus, and what did he think of the guy who ran the mess hall?