It's been annoying me ever since you asked and I gave a crappy answer, considering it's what I want to spend my adult life teaching. I should be able to explain to my students why history is important, why it is so much more than a bunch of old dead guys and dates, and why they should give shit. But it's difficult when it seems like nothing more than facts. Events that took place in a time that never mattered to you, had no adverse effect on what is going on today. And it's especially hard when we all realize that we won't end up in any history or record books and that eventually we will be forgotten. I understand that will all of these things stacked up against it the subject of history seems, to put it mildly, boring. Antique. Unnecessary.
But if you will just allow yourself to stop looking at history as a dead and decaying subject and instead realize that it is very much a living, breathing thing. History is what is happening right at this very moment, it's what happened yesterday, it's what will happen tomorrow or a year from now. It may be a terrible example but, our kids are going to ask us what it was like to be alive when September 11th happened; where we were, what we were doing. Hell, they may even ask us what we were doing when the blackout in New York happened. All of it is history, we may not see it that way, but it is. We don't even know what future generations will find fascinating......maybe the "Emo Movement"?? This recession will be talked about, close to how the Great Depression is talked about. I'm not saying we'll be in bread lines and we'll tack on signs outside our towns telling people that transients aren't welcome, but in our century its probably as close as we'll come. We'll talk about George W. Bush like our parents talk about Nixon. History is not old and dusty, it just has a bad reputation for being that way, because that is how it is taught most of the time.
I was wrong when I said we learned from our mistakes. We don't for the most part. Otherwise, we wouldn't still have genocides, only in different countries. There wouldn't be anymore war, world or civil. American's wouldn't be trying to shove democracy down everyone's throats because they would know that you can't force a form of government on a people. But these things still happen, of course they do; because people, especially world leaders, are morons and it's a shit, shit world. Except, I believe we, as a human race are capable of learning from our mistakes. Countries by themselves have learned from their past; America no longer practices slavery, Britain is no longer colonizing India, Russia is no longer Communist......probably. So yeah, the world is not perfect, but I think we can try.
On of the most important points to me, although maybe not to anyone else, are the people throughout history who have died for what they believed in, or shown that greatness is possible. Those men and women deserve to be remembered. Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Lindon B. Johnson, they deserve more than to just be remembered as dead presidents. Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth I, Harriett Tubman, Rosa Parks, Catherine the Great; they all deserve more than to be remembered as merely women. The soldiers of the Revolutionary, Civil, and World Wars although we may no know all their names we can learn about the battles and their culture and remember them for what they sacrificed.
I could keep going, but I can't really tell if I've made my point or not. We don't disappear once we're gone, whether we know it or not. Everyone makes their mark in history, it just depends on how big you want your mark to be.
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