There is a lot of talk about the age of people who run for office, and how old is too old. The debate has merit, but a piece of the conversation is often overlooked: If you don’t know history, you are doomed to repeat it. Experience counts.
I am old enough to remember when Blacks were not allowed to enter “whites only” businesses. When a wife had to have her husband’s permission to buy a car. When girls were required to wear dresses to school and were forbidden to take “Shop” class—while boys weren’t allowed in “Home Economics.” In my lifetime, it was acceptable to refuse to hire a person simply based on race or gender.
Without such memories, it’s easy to believe things were always as they are today, and that people who claim otherwise are making much ado about nothing.
Experience doesn’t always trump book knowledge, but having a real connection with an event or a circumstance, however tenuous, generally carries more weight in our minds than learning about it second hand. And if we do learn it second or third hand, the closer we are in time to the actual event, the more weight the lesson seems to carry.
I recently read Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” a book by Zora Neale Hurston, published posthumously. It’s the account of the last human in the USA known to have been brought to slavery from Africa—primarily a narrative in the African man’s own words, heavy with dialect.
Hurston died in 1960—I was alive then. Only six years old, but our lifespans did intersect. Consequently, I now have a sense that, in the grand scheme of things, slave ownership in America was actually fairly recent. A person who was alive in my lifetime actually shared meals and stories with a person who was abducted in Africa and brought to the USA. Somehow this brief connection in time makes the history more vivid. More real. Less excusable.
It’s easy to think of slavery in America as something so long ago that we surely have all evolved greatly since then. But reading this book has changed my perspective. When I felt farther removed from the original chronicles of slavery—from first-person accounts of Africans forced into bondage—it was easier to write it off as before my time hence not my fault, and not my problem. I can’t do that anymore.
While it’s true slavery and other historic human ills are not my fault, absolving myself of the responsibility of their effects on the present seems to me unwise. Such acts of absolution doom societies to recycle their bad behavior. And I’d prefer to help humankind lean toward human kindness.
There are days when we want to turn off the constant stream of news and forget the ills of the world, and given the ubiquity of news sources, a periodic hiatus is probably necessary to keep our brains from exploding. But if we make it a habit to look the other way—or if we attempt to erase or disregard history— we are more likely than ever to repeat our species’ mistakes. Makes no difference on which side of the political fence those mistakes originally occurred.
Attending to actual accounts of human lives can help us to help ourselves. We should listen to our elders. Sometimes we can learn from geezers who have been around the block, as they say.
Or you can dismiss these comments as the incoherent ramblings of a fossilized citizen—who, thankfully, is not running for office.