Dec 7 – is a day to reflect on our perspective on history – for those who do not know their history. Our time seems to be so focused on ‘today’ we lose track of even recent history. We think of the ‘horror’ of 9-11 and yet forget the ‘last horrors’ so quickly. Today is the 65th anniversary of that date. and those actually there are old enough to not expect many to see the 70th.
I am a student of history and have done a fair bit of traveling in the US, and some beyond — I have stood on the remains of the Battleship Arizona, (still grave to some 1200 men and women), and walked on the battlefields of Manassas and the Little Big Horn, I am also a New Yorker by birth and my first 18 years. Every one of those events were as horrendous in their time as 9-11, and not to degrade the horror of one over the other. I am old enough to remember JFK and my dad remember’s Pearl Harbor — yet, my great-grandmother (who I knew for a few years) remembered all back to Fort Sumter.
As fast as our world has been changing in my kid’s lifetime, history and what we can learn from the past stretches far further back than we recall on a regular day — today is a good day to remember that.