Posted by
Duffbert on Tuesday, February 12, 2008 12:08:21 AM
Last Friday I was making small talk with my niece, who thinks she's far more mature than she truly is. You know the type... 11 years old, and thinks that she knows so much more than the adults around her. She bristles when you call her a kid, and gives you the correct title of "Pre-Teen". I don't remember ever talking like that to my uncles or aunts, as she treads dangerously close to the line of disrespect... but enough about her attitude. I indulged her, and tried to engage her in some conversation to show her that her uncle is a thoughtful deep guy. Some how we arrived at a topic of history, and I enriched her with a little fact about our national history, to which she replied "History is boring... I'm all about the future and the now". This struck a chord with me and made me ponder a bit.
Sadly, my niece is not abnormal in that attitude. I know many adults that know very little of history and worse yet are proud of their historical ignorance. I went to see the movie Atonement this weekend with my lovely wife, who I find to be very intelligent, and she had never heard of Dunkirk before. Dunkirk was a fairly significant historical event! It's not like I was expecting her to remember President Truman's election opponent, or name the Pope in 1940? We're talking about the largest scale naval evacuation ever!
What is behind this ignorance, and even disinterest in history? Based on the symptoms and personalities of those who say history is "boring", or prefer to live in the "now" or the "future" - I see alot of the selfishness of our society causing this. We shower our children with toys, gifts, and everything else they want. We want them to have a "better life than we did". When I look at my children, who have less than many of their friends, I still see far more material possessions than they need. They have more toys than they could ever possibly play with, and still they want more. And like I said, my kids don't get everything they want - unlike most of their friends and cousins. It has become an expectation to most kids, to get everything they want - breeding greed, laziness, ingratitude, and the expectation of privilege - all dangerous characteristics of the selfish individual.
In other cases, mostly the adults I know - though some are selfish too - their ignorance is based on the desire to relieve their stress by not thinking about serious topics. There is very little history on TV, and they just want to unwind at the end of a hard day and forget about their stress. They are also so focused on making progress and moving forward that they don't care about what is in the past. And God forbid having a serious conversation with a friend - let's keep it light and non-political, so no-one gets uncomfortable, or feels stupid.
What truly concerns me is the times we are in and how there seems to be so many parallels to the past. As General Santayanna said, "those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it". I see the parallels between Radical Islam and Nazism, and how many in this country want to ignore the global threat as "not our problem", much like the US in the 1930s. I see the economic troubles our country faces, the debt we are all in, and beginnings of a media driven panic. I see a government that wants to propose more government spending to solve these problems, which seems like it would only make things worse.
Perhaps if more people paid attention to our history they'd be able to understand the mistakes of the past and prevent them, or at least take care of them while they were still minor problems.