It’s been some six months since I wrote here. It feels good to have enough energy to make my mind work and come up with words to make my fingers work. The last 4 months have been their own kind of recuperative hell from ankle and lately knee pain. The fall into a hole that I never saw has left me close to depressed at times, mostly because it was hard to see a full recovery of my ankle. As it progresses, I get a little less concerned each day and grow confident that I will be walking on the wild side again.
We all know there is a subject in school called History, right? But I wonder if History is important or required for many students to engage with these days. In fact, the title of this post is a bit of a sad admission that history needs to have something of a renaissance.
I am prouder of my son and daughter than they both realize because they both graduated with degrees in subjects that used to matter a lot and I believe have shaped their lives. And those subjects, History for my daughter and English for my son, will come to matter a great deal to them again. They both are very literate, far more than I am and they think well and often of great and minor things alike. For that, they have my respect. As I write this, I am getting some payback from helping both of them to get their degrees, English from him and the words I choose and history from her for the topic I’ve chosen.
Now, to history matters. The historians I’ve read are more often than not, looking to the immediate and long term future of our world and its nations. For many of them, that is why they studied history. To learn something of the past and the way the past repeats itself so that they might be able to suss out what the future looks like. When well researched historians speak, you know they carry extra weight in their arguments because they have looked at matters from several sides and examined and weighed the facts and circumstances of events and characters that made history.
That reason alone has been the driving force why I read so much history, on all sides I might add. It gave me no pleasure to read Mein Kampf when I was a teenager. I found Hitler to have monstrous and barbaric tendencies from well before the beginning of WW2. Reading Marx is no picnic, boring and whinny in fact. Both readings were un-redemtpive, offering little intrinsic value or character building guidance. In fact, both became models of what not to do in life.
Yet, I read them for their viewpoints and arguments. Match that up with the consequences of their experiments in humanity and the genocides they unleashed and you have your reason for reading history and becoming an amateur historian.
I found myself in possession of a book of anarchy called Steal This Book from Abby Hoffman on how to live off the system, steal your food and clothing and transport. He had a section on how to steal coins from pay phone booths by slipping thin cardboard down the change shute and capturing the money in the change maker at the bottom of the phone case. Now that’s some history for you. Does anybody remember the culture of standing at a telephone booth and dropping dimes, nickels and quarters in at the operators direction? I sure do.
My father found that book in my room one day and I’ll never forget the whooping I got. I suppose he taught me a lesson. He’s long gone now and I think it stuck. I am responsible for what I read and what goes into my mind and what comes out of my heart. He was afraid I would turn out to be some kind of misfit wastrel in life and he would have nothing to show for his wayward son. There is a famous parable that illustrates this as well in the Bible. My father was not as forgiving as that one of course, but I’m sure he felt similar sadness over me. He may have been very happy to hand me over to the army as well so that I became their ward and problem.
At any rate, I read a lot, mostly history, because I wanted to know what the future might look like. I care about the future, not that I’ve made a scintilla of difference in how it will turn out. But I might make a difference in someone’s life and direction by explaining the outcome of Anarchy or Communism or Totalitarianism, etc. All those have been tried and found wanting and terribly destructive.
Once the Greeks unearthed Democracy, the world started down a new and unknown path. Filled with mystery and possibilities and choice, it became the best from of government available to humanity from an earthly perspective. While many see God as a benevolent dictator, I see Him as the founder of true Democracy. That is why I enjoy reading His words and following His ways. I think the Bible is the best path forward and its history is to be studied and embraced. Billions of people in the past and at present don’t agree. That too, is part of God’s government. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.
Is the study of history in a bad way today? It sure feels like it. Ask someone who was the fourth president of the U.S. and I don’t know what you’d hear, or the third or second. Some have no idea of the first, Yikes. Ask who started WW2 or WW1 or any of those kind of questions and you might as well be looking at blank faces. Does History matter to everyone? No. But it does to me. And hopefully you.