Forgetting the Past_Drew Washington

Our most present and urgent problem in today’s society is not forgetting the past. The past is what creates present, the present is what creates future. Therefore, essentially, the past is what creates our tomorrow. In school we are forced to take a series of history courses in which we learn the history of ancient roman culture, ancient greek culture, our own American culture, and even sometimes the history of our own family lineage. But is simply learning and reading out of the textbook enough? Is furiously memorizing names we can’t pronounce and dates that all blend into one truly the essence of remembering the past. In turning the past into a series of dates, names, and ideas, we separate ourselves from  “that world.” The past becomes a place, an idea in which we do not really identify with nor care about. We become detached and begin to believe that what is written in our history books has no affect to our lives, or in essence our existence as productive humans.  Think about it. Essentially our mom and dad’s generation is simply an era of huge hair and unnecessarily high platform shoes. Our grandparent’s era is simply the era of no color, the era where everything is portrayed in black and white, seeming uninteresting and useless in comparison to our busy and colorful lives today. In the same way as we feel distant from those generations, our kids will too feel distant from ours. What will be to them? Will we be an era that was silly enough to believe that the Iphone 5 is the best that technology can get. Or will we be known as the era who is insanely obsessed with being “hip” and thinking that dressing grungy or like a bum if you will is trendy. What will we be remembered as? Preserve our history, preserve what we are, or we too will be lost in the pages of the uninteresting, dusty textbook simply filled with names we do not understand and seemingly irrelevant numbers.