We scribblers great and small are scratching onto the surfaces of our lives the record of events that preceded the moment we sat down to write. Some of these events will be reviewed and dismissed as mundane, important only to the writer and the writer’s circle; other events will be judged to have had an outsized impact on the world, and will be given the name, “history.” Just as “epic,” “awesome” and “classic” have been, the word “history” is misused daily. The following definitions are from two different dictionary sources:
History: noun – a narration of (in later use, esp. professedly true) incidents; a narrative, a story; the study of past events, particularly in human affairs; a continuous, typically chronological, record of important or public events or of a particular trend or institution
It has become popular for politicians and pundits to use the phrase, “the right side of history,” but I contend that there is no “right side” to history. History has no sides, no left, right, up, down or middle. Judgments of the events should wait until the record is reviewed, and the record will be reviewed from the point of view of the reviewers. A few years ago, I discovered that one of my favorite writers was an ardent segregationist and fierce opponent of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. His column on writing is still one of my resources, but very few people have judged his segregationist views as “right.”
Every moment that we have lived through has the potential to be a part of the “record of important or public events.” There are many things that have happened in this country that have been judged as atrocities. I’ll not review them here, for some are obvious and some — not so much. My grade school in Pittsburgh, Penn., was named after Henry Clay Frick. When I was standing at the crosswalk wearing the white belt of a crossing guard, I did not know that Frick was the manager of the Homestead plant of Carnegie Steel Co., who, along with Andrew Carnegie, was responsible for a murderous rampage of strike-breaking. When I left the halls of Frick school, I went to the library endowed by Carnegie. Which was the greater atrocity: the Homestead strikebreaking, or the naming of a school after the strikebreaker?
Long ago, someone asked me what I wanted for my children. They were referring to my two youngest, who were gamboling about my feet as I worked. I gave the question some thought then answered, “I just want them to be decent human beings.” And they are, all three of them: Lisa, Lauren and Christopher. Their decency has been learned and earned, observed and passed on, and recorded in my narrative, my story, my personal history.
As we slide into another year (it is snowing as I write this and I know that I will slide somewhere, later) we should pause to reflect on the quality of our personal record of achievements. If we have lived with the idea that we should always be decent and do decent things, our historical record will be viewed in a positive light. And even when we fail (I have personally set fire to many of the good parts of my life) we can stand again, rebuild and recommit to living as decent people, good neighbors and friends. We cannot always be right, but we can always try, and let the reviewers of our history decide whether or not we made a good effort to “achieve the peace.”