Most TV dialogue is just words advancing the plot, but every now and then, a quote emerges that resonates.
Such was the case for me while watching the episode "War Eagle" from the series Longmire.
In the episode, Sheriff Walt Longmire investigates the murder of the caretaker of a Second World War Japanese internment camp (War Eagle). The impetus for the murder was the caretaker tracking down his half-brother, who was the progeny of his father (a guard at the camp) and a prisoner.
During the investigation, contemplating why, after all the intervening years, this caretaker was dredging up the past, Longmire says, "History gets heavier the older you get."
I figured the saying had come up before, but the only reference I could find was a really bad poem by a blogger, so for now, I will attribute it to great script writing.
This quote really struck me, because I've been feeling the heaviness of history a lot lately.
A much more famous, but related, quote comes from the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana's 1905 book The Life of Reason.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," he wrote.
I'm not so sure even remembering the past provides any hope of preventing us from repeating it, because there are always powerful people who want to repeat it.
Václav Havel, the Czech author, poet, playwright, and dissident who became the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, saw history as a repeating cycle of oppression and resistance.
“Evil will remain with us, no one will ever eliminate human suffering, the political arena will always attract irresponsible and ambitious adventurers and charlatans," he wrote. "And man will not stop destroying the world. In this regard, I have no illusions.”
I can remember history being one of the most unpopular subjects in high school. Perhaps it was because it was taught in a very dry fashion back then (maybe it still is), but my father, who was a high school history teacher, posited it was because teenagers have little history of their own.
As a teenager, I viewed history as linear and have often felt like I won the lottery of birth, having been born in a time and place that was generally peaceful, prosperous and working toward egalitarianism (if not always successfully).
I now have plenty of history of my own and have no illusions that we have built a perfect society. But for the first time in that history, I am genuinely afraid of what might come next.
If history is cyclical, I fear we may be on the verge of taking a giant step backward.
