Two nations, or two people, can face the same shifting circumstances around them and respond in completely different ways. One keeps orienting entirely around what has already happened, treating old grievances, old habits, and familiar arrangements as the fixed points everything else must be measured against. The other accepts that the ground itself is moving, and organises its attention around where things are headed rather than only where they have been. Kennedy delivered this line on June 25, 1963, in a speech at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, addressing a Europe still reorganising itself less than two decades after the Second World War, at a moment when old hostilities and new alliances were both very much unsettled. He was not offering comfort about how manageable change would be. He was stating, plainly, that refusing to look ahead was itself a kind of blindness, regardless of how carefully someone had studied everything behind them.
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