The Past as the Present

This is going to hurt but it's for your own good:

Memories
light the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories
of the way we were
Scattered pictures
of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were
Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all over again,
Tell me, would we? Could we?

That's right, I've resorted to quoting Barbra Streisand. Actually, back in the 1960s she was pretty hot, but my hormones aside, today's historical meditation is on historical memory, or how -- and why -- we remember history. Today's thoughts were inspired by this being the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres in Beijing, and the fact that the average school student in China today has absolutely no idea that those events ever took place. The early Soviet historian Mikhail Pokrovsky once said that History is just politics viewed backwards, and to a certain extent he's right -- we view the past through the lens of how we live today. Of course, Pokrovsky was a hack as a historian and the more menacing meaning behind his statement was that governments or political extremists should generate and propagate very selectively-screened "histories" to justify their goals and means of achieving them. He apparently hit on a good idea because the 20th and 21st centuries have been filled with all sorts of ideologically-charged propaganda masquerading as History, but still, does what really happened matter? Does it somehow cut through all the political noise and still impact our lives? It does for Chinese citizens today, who, whether they understand the reasons behind it or not, have been deprived of access to several popular social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and yes even Blogger as a nervous Chinese dictatorship tries to quash any memorials to the events of twenty years ago. But still, we all, the 6.8 billion of us, do live in a world where the Tiananmen Square massacre did happen, and it has impacted our lives even if only in subtle ways we are less aware of. We each carry around a unique perspective on those events, even if we don't actively think about them. History, like language, is a living thing that changes with us, and shapes us as much as we constantly re-shape it with our changing worldview. I'll be returning to this theme in future posts but for now, I want to focus on some very brave people who deserve to be remembered: