I enjoyed History when it was only dates. When Charlemagne was King somewhere in Europe (768), or when the Magna Carta was signed (1215), or when Good Christian Soldiers marched into a Muslim Empire (1095). I received top grades for remembering those dates. But the History of today about: The Tulsa Massacre (just recently), or the Sterilization of American Indian women (no dates necessary), or the U.S. military shooting down Venezuelan fishing boats (last week) is disturbing, and it doesn’t seem to have to go back far in time anymore. That Old Bromide of ‘The Past is Prologue’ seems to be playing out with such vengeance the Past is roaring though the Present and into the future. Come to think about it ‘If you are not aware of the Past, you are compelled to repeat it”is meaningless because we repeat the past whether or we know about it or not.
A problem is there is so much history, how do we know which of it to look at? Why beat up on the unpleasant things man has done, even if it is only yesterday when he did it? “Move on” is an approach many in control of things would like our nation to take: 1) We have a woman who earned her stripes in the wild world of wrestling, who is in charge of our now becoming extinct Department of Education. Why look into the past? What good is there in that? 2) A couple of the world’s richest men are in Power and are “Anti-Education” and they know a lot more than most, because they are so rich. My prediction is a lot of History is going to vanish from our collective mind.
Everything we do, everything we say, true or false, goes into the digitized, retrievable pile of history. This pile is growing exponentially…so much so that even with AI we will have difficulty in finding out what was what. I saw a reel where a robot was playing Pickle Ball. He was really good. Then I heard it was a fake. But the Pickle Ball robot is in our history. Somewhere. I see where you can read Jan 6th was a ‘Love Fest”. It goes on and on.
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“It’s like déjà vu all over again.” –Yogi Berra, who also said: “The future ain’t what it used to be.” …but I’d add: “The Past ain’t what it was, either.”
