History is dying

I have these big huge discoveries every once in a while. These discoveries are nothing that anyone wouldn't know automatically but when something brings these thoughts to the forefront of my mind it is blown.

Really, the idea that the people who were born a while ago will die before me is not a new idea. This article from CNN is what started this whole mind blowing line of thinking.
World's oldest man, WWI vet, dies aged 113

"Henry Allingham, the world's oldest man and the oldest surviving British veteran from World War I, has died at the age of 113, his care home said Saturday." In the TV segment devoted to this story, the reporter said that he was one of two still living World War I vets in the UK. These guys are a endangered historical resource. I began pulling history forward and seeing the future. Someday the world will be without any World War II vets and Holocaust survivors. In our lifetime we will see Vietnam Vets go the same way. And in the waning years of my hopefully long life I will see veterans of the first Gulf War fade into the print of history books.

I suppose I realized this a while ago. Every summer we visit my Grandparents in Mississippi. On my mother's side, my grandfather was in Vietnam disarming explosive ordinance. I was about seventeen when I realized that someday he would pass silently into memory and he would no longer be able to tell his story. So that summer I had intentions of buying a tape recorder and asking him all about his experiences. While I didn't get the tape recorder, I did question him extensively about his experience and insight into the Vietnam War. While he was traumatically sent home after receiving a Purple Heart, he spoke jovially about what went on over there.

I realize now that I am slowly but surely moving back to the topic of Legacy. History and Legacy can almost be synonyms. Well, maybe not but they can certainly go hand in hand.

That same day it was reported that the community of journalism had lost a great one of its own. Walter Cronkite, died on July 17, 2009 at the age of 92. It has been said that video and other media will replace text. If the same true in education, then Walter Cronkite will certainly be the author of the history "text books" used in the coming years for history from World War II until the early eighties.

History is fading into the past...and there's nothing you can do about it.