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Living through History

 



We currently live in a time that is unprecedented in its unprecedentedness.

You don’t usually realize you are living through history. History is something that just happens whether you are paying attention or not. It doesn’t feel like history. It just feels like today. Yesterday was just a little bit different than today, which will be just a little bit different than tomorrow. You never grasp that you are living through history until you look back at it. There are focal points in history. Times when the world was forever changed, but we don’t always recognize them as focal point.

Homelessness in the modern sense of the world didn’t exist in America until the 1980’s. There have always been a few people who choose to be homeless, vagrants, tramps, or hobos. But homelessness as an institution began in the 1980’s. Policies were enacted that promoted homelessness: tax cuts, housing cuts, and turning mental patients loose (shutting down institutions). Since then, the homeless problem has ebbed and flowed somewhat in sync with the economy but regardless of the ebbs and flows it has continued on its steady overall incline bit by bit until it has reached crisis proportions. We who have lived through the past 40 years have been a part of it, but not really recognizing it for what it is. We are kind of like the frog put into a kettle whose temperature gradually rises. The frog doesn’t understand that things are changing until he is cooked. A person transported from the 1970’s would be appalled at the homeless camps that occupy every city. The people of today simply see it as “that’s too bad, but that’s the way it is.” Meanwhile, every year it continues to grow.

War tends to have a gradual build-up, perhaps for years. People living in Germany in the 1930’s may have had varying opinions of Adolf Hitler. Some loved him; some hated him; some actively worked against him. But most people (whatever category they chose) tried to continue on with their daily lives. They needed to put food on the table for their families, keep a roof over their heads. That was probably more important to them than the political machinations going on in Munich or Berlin. The policies that they were forced to live by were gradually imposed upon them layer by layer until at some point they found themselves in the bizarre horror that we now think of as NAZI Germany. They could not possibly realize that a vote in 1932 would lead to death camps and a devastating war.  

I suppose the opposite may be true too. Some events that seem monumentally important to us turn out to not even make a blip on the radar of history. I can remember when the Energy Crisis happened in the 1970’s, it seemed like the end of the world as we knew it. It turned out not to be the case. But I suspect the other is more common. After all, we are meant to go on with our lives. It is how we are built, and while an event or a person or a situation may worry us, we may not recognize it as a historical sea change. What focal points will future history books point to from our time? It is hard to see the ocean when you are swimming in it.

Star Liner

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