Making History Real

These days, I am drawn toward Making History Real. For whatever reason, my Culture has taught us to erase those stories of our Ancestors, of our Past. In some Naive Way, we expect the Past is somehow cut away as an unnecessary appendage by some magical Surgeon's knife and therefore not exactly part of Me in the Present or in the Future.

Yes, we are taught an edited form of History. But it seems a sort of Pablum. The Stories of Men, of Conquerors and Conquest, have erased all other who might have been present. We hear not the Stories of Women, Children, Elders, those who are Different, the Poor, those Disadvantaged from Power, those who lost in front of the Steamroller of our Culture. We hear nothing of Nature, except as Natural Resource subdued under the triumphant feet of Men.

Somehow, in that form of History, we snuff out the stories of our Ancestors. Yet they were there and they were bound up in the triumphs and suffering of their times. Their stories are our stories. They have shaped who and what we are.

And so I wonder on this Winter's Night: What are the stories of my Ancestors? What enduring teachings would they have for us that would be essential in our times? What are aspects of their thinking and our own that have not worked in our Collective Story that now should be set aside? What are the Stories of the Invisible Other whose stories have been blocked from view? What of their stories is essential for us to hear now?

Years ago, one of my Students dug up this morsel as Grist for our Fodder: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana, 1863-1952)

Now why would we want to do that?