It is good to live in the present, but to live only in the present is to
deprive it of proportion, perspective, meaning. Without some appreciation
for the past, we cannot live fully in this present. We reduce it to one
dimension. And everything that happens seems to be happening for the first
time.
No wonder we are always taken by surprise. We forget we can be awakened from
our happy dream at any moment. On any day of the calendar. Like September
11. Or December 7. And we are regularly shocked. Imagine: There are people
in the world who wish us ill, who are willing to spend years to carry out
one devastating attack, who live to die. And kill. Unimaginable. Unless we
have some sense of history and our place in it.
Learned fools write impressive books about The End of History, but it
refuses to end. It goes on producing one shipwreck after another, but some
of us are genuinely astounded, and angered, to discover that we're not on
some luxury cruise. War? There must be some mistake. Or a conspiracy. This
isn't what we ordered, waiter, this isn't what we ordered at all. Can we
send it back?
We'd all prefer to be tourists in history rather than participants. Who
wouldn't? But just because we're not interested in war doesn't mean war
isn't interested in us. And one day, one perfectly ordinary day, the
passenger planes go crashing into the New York skyscrapers, or the Zeros
come in low over Pearl Harbor. And we are all so surprised. Again.
I once took the popular cemetery tour down in New Orleans. The pre-Katrina
New Orleans, before history struck there, too, three years ago. It was
peaceful in the cemetery, lulling. All the love and loss recorded on the
cracked old tombstones was so long ago, the pain had faded. Only the fading
inscriptions remained. One felt history there no more than the chipped
angels on the stone monuments might have felt a mother's pain. It was just
an afternoon's entertainment.
Then I got to a little section of plain white, government-issue tombstones,
like the ones, row on row of them, at the National Cemetery on Confederate
Boulevard here in Little Rock. But all of these bore a single date: June 6,
1944. The Normandy beachhead.
Realization struck: All of us wandering around the old cemetery were
breathing free because these men, some of them just boys, really, had died
that day. And so many before them, and to come. It was noon in New Orleans
under a bright sun, but I felt the shadows lengthening. I felt history
beckoning, and realized anew that those who decline to shape it will, one
perfectly ordinary day, be unable to escape it.