A human chain

We find that long ago may not be so long ago.

We’ve concluded that the first sign of real maturity, that first stage after being undeniably Young, is when schoolchildren are learning as History something you remember as news.  It’s one of the shocks of life, all the more disturbing for being utterly predictable.  And as one goes on, more of the familiar background of one’s life becomes unfamiliar to young people.  A common response is cynicism, almost despair, as the hard-won lessons from having lived through events are lost to the newer generations.

But we’ve recently realized that the process can be viewed another way.  Consider our navigator.  He had a long friendship with an older cousin, one who had served in the Navy during the Second World War.  This cousin had, as a child, lived in a house with his parents and grandfather.  He had many memories of the old man, who had enlisted as a private in a Pennsylvania regiment in the Civil War.  So our navigator had contact, at just one remove, with a Union soldier.  This astounded him when he first thought about it.  That conflict was fought long ago, in a different world, by people who thought differently and are all gone now.  To many people it is now made up of sepia photographs, old maps and a few manicured battlefields.  And yet the human chain easily reaches that far.

Take another bit of history: the Wild West.  It has certainly been a major cultural theme in the US.  As an historical event, it can be placed between the Civil War and the First World War.  Our Pennsylvania private lived through its full extent.  As history goes, people are actually rather long-lived.

[We apologize for the prominent role of wars in this post.  They’re easy to use as historical markers mostly because they make a lot of noise.  Another time we’ll try to take a more balanced look at the Wild West.]

So use this human chain to reach into History!  Well, that’s easy for our navigator to say.  Both he and his older cousin served on aircraft carriers in the Navy.  Though they did under vastly different conditions, that was a theme they could use to connect and compare.  And the cousin eventually wrote up his experiences, something now more valuable since we lost him a few years ago.  Our Union private wrote letters and even poems; pearl beyond price, we have a pocket diary he kept in 1863.

Not everyone has prolific writers as part of their chain.  Well, start.  Reach up your chain and ask your older cousins about the older days.  A few stories will bring textbook History to life.  Don’t worry about the broad horizons and the deeds of kings; the important part is the human chain.