Memory Day
While I live in the southern United States, an area whose maps are spotted with battlefields and monuments, I haven’t had much urge to visit them on Memorial Day.
It’s not that I don’t care about history it’s just that I don’t really feel close to much of it. Time has made it so far removed from now that it seems like the history of another culture. In some ways it would be like visiting the monuments of Greek battle sites or of great warriors - distant and removed.
I’ve spent a good bit of time thinking about how different the world must look today. All the technology, the hustle. Are people really so different now than our (recent) ancestors?
The lives and beliefs of our grandparents seemed to be shaped so differently, by an alternate set of parameters. Our culture now is so cynical, even jaded. What’s done that to us? Is it the constant barrage of (mis)information that has taken away some of our innocence? Or, have people always been as harsh as they are now?
My uncle Dale has spent a good amount of time not only tracing our family’s lineage but scanning in pictures from the past. As I look at the faces of my grandparents, both who have died in the last few years, I see a completely different world. There’s a hope in their eyes, a regard for the life they’re living, that I haven’t even seen in pictures of me since I was 11 or 12.
How far back do you have to go to see hope and innocence in your pictures?
Ric on 29 May 2007 at 7:06 pm #
You never know the significance of an event until later. An untimely death changes the future. A casual remark poisons a friendship. It happens to everyone.
People in the past were no different; I see it unfolding as I live. What you believe creates your present and future be that a prison or an unexplored continent.