Childhood memories are often the remnants of stories told by parents and grandparents of their youth. In many ways it’s the stories that we hear as children of their past that root us in our family and our sense of belonging. I know that the stories that I heard of my grandparents and great-grandparent still are important and relevant in my own life. They give me a perspective of where the world has been that help me compare it to where the world is now.
When my grandparents were in their early twenties the World War II was about to take place. The world had seen atrocity before, but was naïve to what was about to come. I think somehow being told by someone who experienced it rooted me in the idea that it was real and that all the images that I saw in books and on film were real. It was a perspective that rooted me in history. I knew it from first hand accounts.
Today as I watch the way the Mideast seems to be crumbling into chaos at the hands of the power hungry it scares me. It scares me a lot, because I know the history and I know how a simple event can tumble the whole world and all the tensions into massive war. I know that it was real, and I know that people really died. I know that what is happening in Iraq and now in Lebanon are real and that people are really dying and it not only saddens me but scares me. I do not want those kinds of stories to tell my grandchildren. I don’t want them to have to be rooted to whatever tragedy we are about to experience, but what history never gave me the lesson on how one person can stop it.
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