AUG 04, 2024 | Demi Zheng
and the perils of doing so
No one can deny that we live in a fast paced society where skill and usefulness to the system matter above all else. Your productivity and efficiency and ability to push forward are necessary for your earning money and survival. We are constantly afraid of falling behind. So, we like the new things. The innovations. The technology. The youth. We chase the new products, invest in the new businesses, come up with new ideas. We look forward to the future and dream. We envision a world where progress never stops, where the next big breakthrough is right around the corner, and where we are always striving to create something better than what came before.
So, we neglect the old. We throw away our old flip phones, discard our aging traditions, forget our elders’ wisdom. Worst of all, we look at the history of our peoples and say, “Well, we’ve got nothing to do with the mistakes they made. We’ve changed.” And perhaps we have built this culture around moving forward and making change and progressing simply because we are afraid of looking back. Because reflecting on our past means acknowledging our atrocity and our cruelty and our violence. Because that is a burden too heavy to bear and burying ourselves in what we have the potential to be — the billions of possibilities — is easier than to look at what we actually were.
“History” is the study of our human past, a subject which we must all face in our education. Yet we so clearly see reflected in the writing of history the ideals of our present. We glorify progress. Time and time again we justify our inhumane actions by exclaiming how, by doing so, we opened up pathways to new opportunities and eras of change. As Howard Zinn argues in A People’s History of the United States, we continuously say that the tragedies in Hiroshima and Vietnam were “to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all.” Other stories and perspectives are hardly mentioned — as if so as to erase them. America killing millions of natives and displacing millions more. Columbus and the genocide of natives in his quest for gold and slaves. No, instead, we must frame these truths as America expanding westward to find new lands and new resources and as Columbus, a man of genius who believed that we could sail West to go East, doing what is necessary to bring about prosperity to the state of Spain. What a glorious and heroic man! Why talk about murder and rape and forced labor when we can talk about an intelligent and patriotic man exploring and cultivating “uninhabited” lands?
But by doing so we are ignoring and forgetting our truth, replacing it with a romanticized view of violence. What we are saying is that “it’s okay, as long as you give a reason and people buy it.” So, even right now, in an era where our progress has led us to be able to gain widespread access to information, we still commit atrocious crimes because we are allowing ourselves to. In an era where we can see what is happening and where we can keep each other accountable if we wanted to, we are still allowing these things to happen. So can we really call it progress when we haven’t changed? When we are still silencing and denying the voices and stories of victims? We have not moved forward. We have stayed in place for centuries justifying our inaction through new technologies and innovations. Perhaps that is the worst crime of them all.
I am using the word ‘we’ as a collective sense of humanity. Not one country or another. Thus, I want to make it clear that my point is not to debate whether who is right and who is wrong and who is worse and who is better and who should apologize and who deserves an apology. Those questions are moral gray areas that would take too long to analyze. Even then, you will still not have a concrete answer. And maybe you will never have one. However, it does not matter what side you take. Instead, it matters that you acknowledge that certain actions were wrong. That it should not happen again.
We must face these uncomfortable truths head on. Yes, we are ashamed. Yes, it should not happen again. Yes, we are responsible for remembering.
But if, whether unwittingly or not, we have a habit of avoiding these painful experiences and memories and histories and, for the most part, they are not talked about, how might we, as the youth, remember the forgotten truths? How might we access reliable information? Where would we even begin to start?
The answer lies in the true victims of our obsession with the future and abandonment of the past: the elderly. The living beings who we are actively trying to marginalize, scorn, and forget. As reported by the National Council on Aging on July 8, 2024, “one in 10 Americans age 60+ have experienced some form of elder abuse.” We say their opinions are “old fashioned” and “outdated.” We call them “useless” and “a waste of time and money.” We take advantage of them because they are frail.
What we don’t realize is that they are the ones that hold the keys to unlocking our history, both the triumphs and the tragedies. They lived through the wars, the civil rights movements, the societal shifts that we now only read in textbooks. They saw first-hand how the world once was.
We can start with our grandparents. Talking with them about their lives. Learning their stories. Crying with them through the sorrows and laughing along through the fun and the joy. Listening to their advice with open minds. Only then can we truly start to make progress. Now, instead of “sailing West to go East,” we should look backwards to move forwards.