For those who cannot remember the past (11/09/2021)

This weekend I was reminded of the saying often attributed to the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I was being interviewed by a fairly close friend for her school project about my career in environmental sciences; how I got to where I am now. My friend is relatively young, I think in her mid to late thirties, and is trying to finish her college degree on-line. This was part of one of her final projects. I find her a go-getter, very intelligent and overall, a very nice gentle person. It was fun to be interviewed by her. This is in no way an editorial or a judgement on her.

There was one point; however, where she drew a blank. I mentioned Idi Amin and she had no idea who I was talking about. Maybe not surprising since he was a ruthless African dictator who ruled a relatively small country from approximately 1971 to 1979 (way before she was born). My wife and I lived in Uganda during that time and went through the bloody civil war that ousted Amin in 1979. Back then everybody talked about the “Conqueror of the British Empire” as he called himself. He even inspired two movies, one based on the raid of Entebbe where the Israeli commandos freed hostages from an airplane hostage taking; the other “The Last King of Scotland” was based on the first few years of Amin’s reign. It was after the Entebbe raid when my wife and I moved to Uganda to work at the leprosy center in Kumi.

My concern is not my friend or Amin, but I realized we have a collective amnesia with the past. Whether it is the climate, yes, we may make fun when grandpa talks about having to walk to school through three-foot-deep snow and other fairy tales. Or was there really a holocaust, a guy named Hitler who was a demagog, a landing on the moon? Before long we will forget we will forget we lost a war in Viet Nam or even Afghanistan. Did the US really support dictators in Central America? Never heard of a guy named Samosa. Let’s not talk about Gaddafi, Mugabe, Marcos, just to name a few. Then we should never mention how the CIA assisted in overthrowing governments like the one of Allende in Chile.

To me the worst of it all is the attempted overthrowing of the election on January 6, and let’s not talk about this weird idea of critical race theory that is floating around. We definitely do not want to teach our kids that it was their grandparents who were standing in front of the public schools and universities yelling and shouting the N-word and trying to prevent these institutions from integrating and allowing students of color a proper education. Let alone their grandparents were openly members of a group that were wearing hoods and burning crosses onto lawns of folks who were for the integration of society. No, we do not want our children to know that grandpa and grandma were these folks and that we, your parents, were raised by them to by like them and we (secretly?) hate minorities, as well.

This is what I realized this weekend! We live in such a sheltered U.S. centric society, where we do not learn about our past, let alone the global international past, or we purposely want to ignore it. We do not learn world history, or we purposely want to ignore it. Conversely, instead of ignoring it, we spin it to fit our narrative, with the result: a demagog and an aspiring dictator was able to get elected. He and his henchmen are still out there, and we must be careful. We need to study and learn from history in order not to repeat it!

This is one of my baby bonsai trees in its fall colors.  It is a forest planting of two dawn redwoods.  Dawn redwoods are among the oldest trees in existence.  Once thought to be extinct and only found in fossil records, a small forest of them was found in a valley in China and from there they concurred the world as horticultural specimens.  Obviously, this species would have a long memory and able to tell us a lot about world and human history.