A history lesson.

My love for history began when I was a kid.  I remember one Christmas I got a book containing stories, letters, and images of real people during World War II.  I was spellbound.  Here were ordinary people doing extraordinary things in extraordinary times.  The victory gardeners, the Navajo code talkers, the concentration camp inmates, the D-Day soldiers.  Perversely, I was actually jealous of these people—they got to live history.  All I could do was read about it.  In the naïve, grammar-school mind of an upper-middle class white girl, history was over.  The world, or at least my world, was stable and prosperous.  Nothing exciting or dangerous would ever happen again.  The struggles of earlier generations had born the fruit that was my blissful childhood in the ‘90s.

Of course, I was so wrong.   I had thought of history as stories with neat beginnings, middles, and ends.  It was a convenient way to take it all in.  But history does not happen that way.  We can’t know how historians will classify the present moment.  Is this moment—the departure of the UK from the EU, the rise of Donald Trump—the beginning of a new, fearful era in the experiment of liberal democracies?  Is it a strange, momentary aberration in the trend toward global economic cooperation?  Or is it (pause for melodrama) the end of the world as we know it??? 

When I read history now, I consciously try to erase my bias of hindsight.  I had realized I was taking events in history for granted. Of course the Allies won World War II.  Of course the D-Day invasion worked.  Of course Neville Chamberlain should have known never to shake Hitler’s hand.   But when I suspend my knowledge of how the story ends, the plot becomes more treacherous.  Certain characters, like Chamberlain, engender more sympathy.  His country had not long before emerged from the worst war it had ever known.  He did not know something more terrible could be on the horizon.  Other characters, like Eisenhower and his D-Day soldiers, earn even more admiration and awe.  The D-Day invasion had absolutely no guarantee of success.  Eliminating the advantage of hindsight allows us to understand that the moments we study in history are defined by their uncertainty. 

More now than at any other time in my life, I am hyper-aware of the uncertainty of the future.  For the first time, I look to the future with great unease.  The only other moment rivaling this is 9/11 and its immediate aftermath, but the difference between now and then is my faith in the stability of government.  I don’t know if we can overcome the dysfunction in Washington.  I am afraid of a Trump presidency.  I don’t know if our system and national wellbeing can weather his ignorance and narcissism.  That scares me more than terrorism.

I finally feel like I’m living history, but I wish I could tell fourth-grade Claire that it’s not as cool as we thought.