Many people do not like history.. They find it boring, irrelevant, and therefore form negative opinions of it. Some are so anti-history that they refuse to even address the topic when it is staring them in the face. When faced with history they say it does not apply or that much time has elapsed, and the old problems are problems no more. Such thinking has hampered us as a nation as we continue to repeat the same mistakes of the past. It has led to many a commission and committee which tell us the same things and has only resulted in them being tossed aside as they invariably mention historical structural problems and deficiencies.
How do we get across to these people that history, it’s events and actions matter in the modern-day? How do we show them that the issues faced today are historical and that their solutions can only be found through looking at and analysing the past?
One way is to show them that these historical events which seem so distant are actually in living memory or that their metaphorical bodies are still warm to the touch. The best way to do this is by first putting numbers to terms. What is a generation for example? A generation can be defined as twenty to thirty years of a person’s life, not a short time when we realize that the average life span even in the 1800s was 60 years (about a decade more today). With that out of the way, let us look at some examples of how what some call ‘ancient history ‘still haunts us today…
jamaicachange 