Columnists
The future
I’m a historian, I look back and see what I see. And I see it through the eyes of the people who lived there, in the past, at the time.
This why I don’t understand the need to dig up history, only to measure it up against our sophisticated standards of right and wrong. Easy for us to do—Canada hasn’t had a war on our land since 1815, brought to us by our ‘friendly neighbours’. As a teen, I was not drafted to fight in Vietnam. We haven’t lost all of our children in the flu epidemic of 1918. Since Canada chose to be ‘peaceful’ we can easily discard the valour, courage and death of our County boys who fought and died—or were changed forever—by making their stand in World Wars 1 and 2.
Easy to pass judgement on past events. Easy to discard the efforts of all the people who made sacrifices to allow us to … be what we are.
THIS GOT ME THINKING …
There are those who look at the past, and tear down the people who moved our country forward, though they acted in the mindset of time. Today we see a flurry of tearing down statues, removing names of our forebears, and basically running a dry erase brush over our past.
I’m a believer that if we forget our past, we are doomed to relive it. Someone famous once said that, and it stuck with me.
Then there’s us, right now. I read a book in high school by T. Hall which explored how we operate as a species. His take was a sequence of circles, like a dartboard, to describe our levels of what we consider to be important.
For example: If you are alone, the most important thing is to keep yourself alive. The centre of the board. When you have a family, that ring expands: You, family. As this grows, and you and your family are safe, with a house and a job, you can grow to the next circle, which is community.
I’m sure at this point, you can see how this worked so well in the County, as we grew from our early roots. As our comfort zone increases, our outreach grows. When we have home and family, and support from the community, we are free to engage in the Province and the country and, inevitably, the world.
At this point, when the family and community are secure, we start to explore the circles beyond, which define our society.
BACK TO NOW
Now that we are tuned into global situations, and are comfortable in our own homes, with our families, we get to look out on the rest of the world. Funny thing is: We move beyond the circles we can understand.
Today, people have opinions about—and even do marches for—causes without any clear understanding of the conflicts in countries we know nothing about. What we read, and what we hear, do not begin to touch the decades and centuries of conflict in foreign countries we’ve never visited, with cultures we have no way of understanding.
Not to get into details, but maybe we should ask why some wars last for decades, or more. Someone want to pop up with an answer? It has nothing to with peacemaking, and broken peace. It’s a lot about territory, sometimes a lot about religious beliefs, mostly about centuries of hatred, for reasons Canadians can’t comprehend.
Why does Russia want the Ukraine? Beats me. History shows they expand into the eastern states, then withdraw when it doesn’t work out. It’s not unlike the United States, which grabs onto things like Puerto Rico, and then ignores them when trouble hits. It was a shock to Washington that the island was actually a protectorate of the US and they had an obligation to help it. Dammit!
This is a global game of power, in which we do not belong. Like I said earlier, fighting to erase our past doesn’t mean our past wasn’t real. And the reasons people did what they did are also beyond our current understanding.
We think we know what we know, but we don’t. We only judge through our current opinion and modern sensitivities. This is not good. Understanding means a thoughtful approach, and an assessment of the history we’re so eager to abandon.
History is the not the prom dress you kept for years, then discarded it because it didn’t fit you anymore.
CONSIDER THIS
In World War II, Germany and Japan were our hated enemies. Now they are major manufacturers with heavy ties to North American production. Mitsubishi was once the brand of a deadly fighter plane. Now it’s a super-cool car.
The world outside is always in turmoil. It comes down to hate, and hate can never be shut down. As we know, it lasts for centuries, for reasons which are puzzling to us, because we’re Canadian.
Pierre Berton once wrote: The difference between Canadians and Americans is that the US is a melting pot—”Come here and swear allegiance to us, and leave your country behind.” Canada, he says, is a mosaic. Bring us your culture, and we will grow together. Thank God we won the War of 1812.
ABOUT THE FUTURE
Having spent many hours diving into County history, and exploring their lives, I wondered: How will the future us see us 200 years from now?
I see people who care more about themselves and their money than how they can use their lives. I also see an exodus from urban areas, people who gave up the rat race, and became creative individuals and young entrepreneurs, in an environment that allows them to work in a place they love: Home. This will be looked back on as a huge societal shift.
When I was young, 80 per cent of Ontario land was rural agricultural. Now we are 80 per cent urban in population. The future will see how this clashes in the coming years, as urban escapees consume our land, bit by bit. Until we need to take our kids to a zoo to see a ‘tree’.
I see a massive communication network, which allows us to see, but not understand. Looking back, it’s much ado about nothing. Our 200-years-away people will laugh at our efforts to fight things we don’t actually fight, but think we have power we don’t have, fighting things we know nothing about. And backing it with bogus info.
Future will laugh at our technology, even though Zoom and Skype were just a dream when the 1960 Jetsons had unbelievable ‘video phones’ with which you could SEE the person you’re talking to.
Future County people will look back and laugh at the fools who tried to protect birds and wildlife and shoreline and trees, and made desperate attempts to save the things that make us … us. They will be spending their time cutting ribbons on new developments, wedged between 2025 developments, which would be slated to be torn down, being too antiquated. I hope they save a tree or two.
Thank you, Mr. Murray. Why is it that the ones who have given all of us the most hope for any future at all, is barely acknowledged (for one day a year, as is Remembrance Day in November), and yet the new wave of special interest groups are given a week, or a month of acknowledgement? There is something dreadfully wrong with our society, and it saddens me.
And thank you, as well, Steve Campbell.
Yesterday marked the 80th anniversary of a great accomplishment for the free world.
Now, think about this: we are direct beneficiaries of inventions we didn’t create, a democratic system for which we didn’t fight, concepts of equality and human rights we didn’t pioneer, laws eliminating injustices we didn’t experience, military strength offering protection which benefits all of us, technological, scientific, and medical advancements which we had no hand in developing.
As direct beneficiaries of these developments, we are in the most privileged place in history that the human race has ever been, hands down.
We have unprecedented leisure time. We have so much time on our hands that we literally RECREATE WARFARE AS ENTERTAINMENT through video games and other media. While warfare (or threat of warfare) plagued our ancestors and millions around the world today, we….play at it.
We forget that the medical, technological, educational (etc) privileges most of us enjoy are brand new in the timeline of human history. Common childhood diseases have been largely eradicated, people are generally living longer, and technology progresses so rapidly that only the oldest living generations (such as mine) remember a time when information wasn’t instant, food wasn’t “fast”, and daily tasks were much more time consuming.
As a result, historical privilege naturally allows for a certain level of criticism by present-day people towards people of the past. This is especially true in Canada, where our collective knowledge of the past is woefully deficient, and (combined with the fact that we tend to be future-minded anyway) many people don’t actually think the past is worth remembering in the first place—unless it can be weaponized against their political foes.
Our ancestors were products of their place in time, just like we are today. They operated within what was culturally, religiously, socially, politically, and economically expected and normal for their time period and region. Historical privilege seeks to pry them out of their historical context and be scrutinized by modern and Western values and ideas. Historical privilege allows modern people to become the judges and juries for the beliefs, practices, and behaviors of past people: this inevitably leads to their censorship or cancellation.
In summary, we can’t imagine a world which wasn’t as safe, equal, protected, educated, opportunistic, industrialized, and progressive as the one in which we currently reside—-therefore expect people of the past to measure up to those standards.
It’s ludicrous.
And it’s bad history practice.
Historical privilege is an act of cultural ignorance and personal arrogance: it permits the people of the past to be weaponized for social, political, or religious gain rather than understand them in their historical context. It enables us to forget that everything we enjoy today has been built by their blood, toil, and sacrifice.
Everything.
And we wouldn’t be who we are—or have what we have—without them.
We need to do better about acknowledging the historical privilege of living in the Modern West (yes, even with its flaws) and working to understand the past for its own sake—-devoid of an agenda.
We can do better.
“It’s all just a little bit of History Repeating.” Shirley Bassey. Propellerheads.