History is about lives, connections

It is easy for those whose number of decades lived is uncomfortably close to our shoe size to complain about the lack of respect the younger generation (or two) has for history. This is especially true given that we now express our opinions and inner most feelings in 140 characters or less (#Really), post our latest shopping success or meal to our 300 Facebook friends, or spend an evening searching YouTube for kitten videos. After all, such trivial pursuits can't be aiding a serious study of current or past events. But is technology really the reason for a lack of interest in history?

The last couple of years, I've been volunteering at a local high school. In preparing for the upcoming semester, it struck me that the seniors I'll be working with were 3 years old in 2001 and that any reference older than a Taylor Swift song will probably be met with blank looks. It is not a personal defect that they don't appreciate history. For them, history is a bunch of dates, names, poems about sailing the ocean blue, and speeches about four score and seven years ago. 'Ancient” is anything before 2000.

History is not about dates and events, it's about us. It is about our lives and our connections to those events. I remember standing looking out the window on the 24th floor of an office tower about 10 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, thinking, 'That's a long way down.” The rational mind knew all the bad things that were going to happen that day already had but the lizard mind was not so sure. My parents have similar recollections about Dec. 7, 1941, and the day President Kennedy was shot. After 9/11, I better understood my parents and the nation's reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Without an emotional point of reference, it is very hard for us to appreciate historical events.

In high school, I read 'The Diary of Anne Frank.” In college, I read almost every book about World War II in the Cedar Rapids library. After an international business trip, I got to spend four days in Amsterdam, where Anne Frank lived. A colleague and I visited the home which is now a small museum dedicated to her. The tour ends in the apartment Anne and her family occupied. There are plaques on the wall detailing some aspects of their life during the occupation. Nice tour. Nice old museum. At the end I looked out the window of their apartment and remembered a passage from her diary about her steeling peeks out the window. The window was always draped to keep people on the street from seeing in and discovering the family living there. The day of my visit was cloudy and the street below was empty. It was easy to imagine this being Amsterdam during the occupation, the fear that the next person appearing on the street might be Gestapo, and that this was Anne's only contact with the outside world. Now the book made more sense. It wasn't just a story about a young Jewish girl and her family. I now had a frame of reference. It was now personal.

For history to be more than dates, names, events and old buildings, it needs to be personal. It needs to be real. It takes a lifetime to appreciate history. It takes a lifetime of experiences to have a reference point to understand the events of our and other's lives.

If we wish to preserve a piece of history, we need to make it real for others.

' Robert Mershon was born and raised in Cedar Rapids and has 30 years of experience in successful and not-so-successful business ventures. Comments: robert.mershon@sbcglobal.net