History. It's the essence of our human adventure. It tells of what we have done in the past, so we can learn from it to make the right choices in the future. However, it seems that today many young people do not know much at all about history. Even worse, their attitude towards the past, and the future is not very positive in the light of recurring historical events.
Okay, so I don't really expect every teenager in the world to know about Francis Ferdinand, or even who the Austro-Hungarian empire was. I don't expect them to write vast essays on the technical structure of the schlieffen plan, or significance of the Lateran treaty of 1929. However I do expect a slight understanding of world events within the last 30 years! When asked, a group of four teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18, none of them could tell me what the cold war was. I mean, they didn't even know what it was, not to mention why it happened, who was in it, or what the conflict was about! Then just for kicks I asked them if they knew what the Vietnam was was. Well most of them had heard of the second Vietnam war between the Viet Cong and the Americans, but none of them knew why it was fought, or how it was related to the cold war. On top of that none of them had heard of the first Vietnamese conflict between the French and the Viet Minh from 1945 until 1954.
Now while this small lack of information may seem irrelevent in a society so pumped for the future, it is quite significant in it's actual outcome on our society and the possibly side effects in the future.
If people forget the past, and do not remember the lessons we have learned, then they will repeat the same mistakes that have recurred throughout history. The reoccurance of similar events is something that has happened since the beginning of time, and until recently with the advent of information technology, there has been no real way to make the historical information of the past available to the citizens of the present. However now that this technology is available the citizens seem to have a new attitute that is even more frightening than their lack of historical knowledge.
Screw the past, screw the future. Live for the present and get as much out of it while it lasts. This is the new moto of modern society. The instant gratification generation. With no interest in history, and no real concern about tommorow. This is the attitude that will destroy society and bring us back into the dark ages. If we study the past and learn the right moves and the wrong moves, we can prepare ourselves for the future and not repeat the same mistakes as our ancestors when the problems come around. However with the second coming of the me generation, we see an ever growing concern for the future.
Those who lived through many of the terrible events of the 20th century can tell you that there are many, many things that should definatly not be repeated in the coming millenium. Especially those who lived through the horrific events of the halocaust. The saying, "Lest we forget", has been used many times when discussing Hitler's inhuman muder of tens of millions of people, including over six million Jewish people. If our memory of these events fades away, then what is to stop a future Hitler from repeating the terror. The most frightening thing is that with the advancement of technology, the outcome of such an event ever happening again becomes ever more terrifying, knowing that with modern technology countless billions of people could be wiped from existance without even a backwards glance.
My question to you is, what the hell has happened to history? The one lesson you would think we have learned from thousands of years of recorded history, is that history repeats itself. We repeat the same actions as our forefathers, and never learn from the mistakes of the past. The instant gratification generation is the most dangerous, as their own self interests outweight their concerns for anything else.
It's time to ask ourselves what students are learning in schools these days, and why they have such a limited knowledge of our own past. Isn't it time we learned from our mistakes and began working towards a better future where we would not have to worry about the terrible events of the past re-occuring?
So I close with this, if we are ever to change our destiny, we must first understand our history. For destiny becomes history when the future becomes the past. For what is the future, by the time we have written it, it's in our history books. Let's hope someone is reading those books.