Approaching a Continuum

We tend to connect to things on the micro more than the macro. Things need to be personal in order for us to care or remember them.

Think back one hundred years. What would you have been doing? What would have been important to you?

The year is 1907. The Kingston Earthquake that kills over 1,000. The weeks worth of financial crisis until a few of America's richest saved the stock market. The Boy Scouts are founded. Oklahoma becomes a state. A coal mine explosion takes the lives of over 200.

How can something so important, not be important? Think honestly about your reaction to some of these events. Do they really matter to you? Would you have ever thought about them unprompted on a daily basis? Did you even know about them?

And yet they were important, status-changing events for that year. The people close to those in Jamaica and in the mines of Virginia remember. Those who nearly lost everything on the markets remember.

Does anyone still remember? For us, they are just words on a page, maybe not even important enough for a general history class. But what about other major events? How do we really respond to reading about the first Great War, Pearl Harbor, the invention of the Printing Press, The Battle of Hastings, The Boxer Rebellion?

Sympathy? Probably. But a meaningful connection? I have to admit I don't have one. I can listen to my grandfather talk about fighting in the Korean War, but since it didn't affect me on a micro level, I have trouble really concerning myself with it.

Part of it is the past - we humans deal more in the present and future than the past. We do not strive to learn the lessons of the past because they are too large for us. They involve too much abstract. Too much foresight. It's much easier to deal with the tasks of today, of this week, of this month even than to deal with the tasks of the year, or what we need to accomplish in 50 years.

We can't even imagine what we need to achieve in 50 years - not in any tangible, concrete way.

These events that I've listed were important in the moment they occurred. They were tragedies, triumphs, and they've been forgotten or marginalized. We just can't live our lives thinking about the past in a significant way.

It all makes me wonder what people will be thinking about on Sept. 11, 2101.