“From their experiences or from the recorded experience of others, men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.”
Aldous Huxley
My dad believes that he never really had that good of a relationship with his dad. I was six when my grandfather died, but I still remember vividly my father being upset with himself for not saying better how much he loved his father. He hit a cabinet door, I still have yet to figure out what the cabinet did to deserve it. I have to remind myself of that sometimes because the relationship I have with my father would be hard to improve on. My parents have told me that they made a choice, to at times forego wealth or career success in favor of building and maintaining a relationship with me. Even that seems hard for me to believe.
My interest in history comes from my father’s life. I believe that is where most of our interest in history comes from. We are told stories about things that we were not there to witness and it inspires us to learn more. My dad lived through history. He was aboard the aircraft carrier the USS Randolph during the Cuban Missile Crisis and when President Kennedy was murdered. To him, nothing much happened during these moments of international tension. As John W. Gardner puts it, “history never looks like history when you are living through it.”
I was fortunate enough to be invited to the reunion of all the surviving alumni of the USS Randolph, where I video taped a few of the sailor’s stories. I was moved by how humble they were after what I believe are true acts of heroism. I wanted to share their story with everyone I could, and that I had to hear everything they wanted to say. A few months later I found a disturbing statistic that confirmed the importance of telling this story: according to a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs conducted in 2008, within the next four and half years we will lose 98% of all the surviving World War II era veterans, and 90% of all Vietnam era veterans in the next six years.
I realized that my dad’s story is an example of how to learn from the past. After a series of aneurysms has hindered his memories, my dad’s past has become an example of how fleeting is the chance we get to learn from our mistakes.
The challenge of history is to become real, and I believe that putting faces to the stories that we have heard before would go a long way to communicating history in a new way.
